JADE Primer
Jean Vaucher and Ambroise Ncho
Dep. d'informatique
Université de Montréal
September 2003
Index
Introduction
- Installing the software
- Your first programs
- Parallelism and Behaviours
- Agent communication
- Using the DF
- Complex behaviours
- Using ontologies
- Graphical Interfaces
- Mobility
Jade (Jave Agent Development Environment) is a robust and efficient environment for distributed "agent" systems. It was developped in Italy jointly by CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecommunicazioni) in conjunction with the Computer
Engineering Group of the University
of Parma. Jade follows the FIPA standards [Note: CSELT is now known as Telecomm Italia Lab (tilab) ].
The official web site for JADE is: http://jade.cselt.it
We used Jade for the programming assignments in a cours on Agent technology at the Universite of Montreal ( ift6802 ). It proved to be a good choice because:
- it had all the agent features that we needed (and more)
- communication between student "agents" running on various workstations
on the network was trivial to do
- it was efficient and tolerant of faulty programming
- it followed FIPA standards
- the user group is very active and implementors typically respond
to problems within 24 hours
[ Hats off to Fabio Bellifemine and Giovanni Caire ]
On the negative side, JADE may be disappointing to AI people because it lacks mechanisms for "intelligence", planning or reasoning. However, the JAVA base means that JADE can interact relatively easily with Java implementations of Prolog or Expert systems (JESS).
After dabbling with various agent toolkits, our impression is that Jade embodies extensive experience in the implementation of large Agent systems. The software appears to have been debugged, extended and redesigned several times until it gave satisfactory performance.
However, this maturity leads to difficulty for learners. Many Jade features deal with sophisticated matters that beginners either don't need or don't understand. Similarly, the documentation (reports and Javadoc) is suitable for experienced users but quite inadequate for learners. Typically, you find the information you required only after you no longer need it. The examples that come with the distribution are fairly long and designed to show off advanced features, not to illustrate Jade basics.
These pages concentrate on basic features of Jade and we make it a point to use micro examples of under a page each. Longer examples at the end of the primer were written by A. NCho.
Other tutorials
Others have put Jade tutorials on the web and throughout you will find links to other material. An important contributor (apart from Jade's authors) is Prof. David Grimshaw who created a set of pages devoted to Agents, Jade and Fipa in support of his lectures at Ryerson. In particular, we heartily recommend his
Jade tutorials which we used to get started. Other sites include:
- Jade Tutorial (.doc)
(.htm)
from Gerstner Laboratory, Czechoslovakia
URL: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~vaucher/Agents/Jade/JadePrimer.html
Email: vaucher "at" iro.umontreal.ca
version 0.9 (Sept 12, 2003)
Jade 3.0b1