Deployment of distributed multi-agent systems

The agent metaphor has shown its usefulness for modelling as well as implementing complex and dynamic applications. Although a number of agent applications has been successfully realised and used, it must be stated that the distribution of commercial off-the-shelf applications is very scarce. For this discontenting situation, at least two reasons can be identified. On the one hand, the development of agent-based applications is difficult suffering from insufficient standards and tools and on the other hand deployment issues are little researched and supported. In this paper, several deployment-related topics are discussed and a vision for the deployment of distributed multi-agent systems is conceived. From the vision, requirements for launching and configuring agent applications are derived. According to these requirements, a platform independent reference model of the proposed deployment infrastructure is presented. The reference model provides the basis for the development of our ASCML (Agent Society Configuration Manager and Launcher) tool, which is currently implemented for the JADE and Jadex multi-agent platforms.