JADE – Java Agent Development Framework Fabio Bellifemine, Telecom Italia LAB 5 th July

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Table of Content 1.The JADE platform 2.The Open Source Project 3.JADE Board 4.Roadmap 5.Open Issues and Conclusions

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved JADE JADE is an agent platform that implements the basic services and infrastructure of a distributed multi-agent application: –agent life-cycle and mobility –white & yellow-page services –peer-to-peer message transport & parsing –agent security –scheduling of multiple agent tasks JADE allows faster time-to-market for new services by making key functionality available across multiple applications –terminal2terminal and multi-party communication (N:M) –pro-active applications Some relevant features: –is extremely light-weight, ported to J2ME-CLDC-MIDP 1.0 –enables interoperability through FIPA compliance –is an Open Source project originated by TILAB and currently governed by an International Board –is used by several EU R&D projects

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Platform Architecture Agent Container J2SE pJavaJ2ME Middleware JADE API JAVA Layer The platform enables ubiquitous deployment & distributed systems –agents can discover, communicate, and provide services transparently to their location, to the hosting device where needed, based on the MSISDN identity agents can also migrate between different containers –communication is peer-to-peer, multi-party based on semantics, ontology definition, and interaction protocols Notice that services can be provided BY the mobile device and terminal-to-terminal communication is enabled

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Java 2 Platform and JADE JADEJADE-LEAP footprint of the JADE-LEAP run-time on mobile phones: –10-30 Kbyte if compiled with the JVM (ROMizing) – Kbyte otherwise tested over almost all Java mobile phones integrated with Operator APN Radius Server to allow SIM-based addressing and authorization

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved JADE for mobile operators The JADE architecture is a sort of hybrid P2P based on a ‘mediator’ in the Operator Service Centre that controls and authorizes the P2P connectivity: it authorizes a mobile peer to join the JADE network on the basis of the IP address, or certificates, or via the Radius Server integration it assigns logical identifiers to the peers it manages all the events and allows event-based billing it manages hot-changes of the IP address it manages temporary disconnections (e.g. dead spot) it provides store&forward functionality it can be managed in load balancing it enables controls possibly requested by the magistrature Pure agent paradigm is disruptive and dangerous for a mobile operator: it empowers the users and the devices, it reduces control of applications, it can relegate the MO just to the data pipe Java J2ME JADE run-time application Operating System JADE “mediator” APN RADIUS Server

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Model of agent communication agents communicate via asynchronous message passing messages are modeled as communicative actions – each message has Rational Effect and Feasibility Precondition messages can be composed into interaction protocols the meaning of the message content is based on ontology definitions – RDF, OWL, … EnvelopeEncodingScheme ACLEncodingScheme CLEncodingScheme TransportProtocol InteractionProtocol Envelope isTransmittedOver Ontology Message 1 ACL 1 isExpressedIn 1..* 1 1 contains ContentLanguage Symbol 11..*1 belongsTo Content contains 1111 isExpressedIn 0..* 1 1 contains 1

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Ontologies, Protègè and JADE Elements in the CR Model imported from the “upper” ontology class Car extends Concept { private int year; private String type;..... } class Car extends Concept { private int year; private String type;..... } Beangenerator

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved On-going activity on distributed security Constrain/control through policies: – All the actions that an Agent can perform on the platform and on other agents – The access to the services provided by the platform – The access to the application-level services provided by other agents Make JADE a multi-user system – integrate “user” and “ownership” concepts, as for filesystem – assign “permessions” to users and agents of performing actions – “delegate” to others the own permissions Secure communication between agents – Confidentiality, integrity, data-origin authentication Several applications Several actors Several communication flows

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Open Source as a business strategy TILAB (formerly CSELT) launched the Open Source Project in 2000 –at the end of the FACTS project, as one of its major achievements Goals of the Open Source initiative: –to spread the intelligent agents paradigm –to support and drive the FIPA specification process –to create an effective platform –to base business upon the applications the LGPL license was chosen –profit companies can make business based on JADE, they can sell applications using it, they just cannot keep their own private version of JADE –openness and control: the code is king anybody can modify JADE, but modifications must be made public the Board reserves the right of deciding what to integrate in the next releases

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved The Open Source Community (updated 19/6/04) ~ downloads –40+ downloads/day members of the mailing list –5+ s/day 270+ accesses/day at the JADE home page 2 tutorials on JADE at the Borland Conference (San Jose, Nov. 03), CEEMAS, Holomas widely spread in Universities –UPC, UAB, Rovira i Virgili, Braganca, Amsterdam, Budapest, Praha, Parma, Palermo, Rome, Lausanne, … –Utah, Canberra, South Carolina, Toronto, Montreal, Pakistan, Newcastle, … FACTS LEAP mailing list members cumulative # of downloads

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Major contributions from the Community JADE for mobile, LEAP project improvements to the GUIs, BlueJADE for J2EE, SLFormatter, HP's Agents for Mobility Department (HP Labs, Palo Alto, California) support for Hierarchical State Machine, JADE and.NET, Univ. Utah bit-efficient add-on, Sonera HTTP and JMS MTPs, EPFL, UAB, Univ. Galway JSP Tag Library, Univ. Artois Protègè beangenerator, Aacklin ACLAnalyser, Univ. Murcia JADEX, Univ. Hamburg benchmark and comparison with other platforms, Rockwell Automation documentation, support to the mailing list, misc, private people + many others valuable contributions (bug reporting, bug fixing, suggestions,...)

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved ProjectStartingEndingPartners using JADE FACTS BT, FT, CSELT, KPN, ICL, IRST DICEMAN CSELT, KPN, StarLab LIME Imperial College Monads Sonera Comma Univ. Parma, INRIA, ATOS eXPlanTech(IST ) Univ. Prague IBROW Acklin MedPAge Knowledge On Demand ? IMAGE (IST ) Singular Sofware SA LEAP BTExact, Siemens, Motorola, TILAB EUTIST-AMI(IST ) Univ. Prague SONG TILAB, ICL AgentCities severals (see the next sheet) ICONS (IST ) Univ. Ulster SAFIRA ICL Pellucid (IST ) ? TeSCHeT (Italian MIUR project) Engineering, TILAB PISA TNO, FINSA, TUDelft Collaborator Univ. Parma, ATOS, Univ. Madrid AgentAcademy University of Twente, APS-group Esperonto Univ. of Liverpool MaBE Profactor, Atos, … CrossWork Profactor JADE in the EU R&D Projects Usage of JADE is difficult to track because of the LGPL license. This list is incomplete and not up-to-date. It does not include national projects, e.g. German and Italian MIUR funded. We estimate that we are not aware of about 80% of the projects that have used/are using JADE

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Table of Content 1.The JADE platform 2.The Open Source Project 3.JADE Board 4.Roadmap 5.Open Issues and Conclusions

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved JADE Board Founded on March 2003 by TILAB and Motorola –as a follow-up of their collaboration in the LEAP project –as a not-for-profit contractual consortium among the Members Mission –Promote, govern, and implement the evolution of JADE Goal –JADE adoption by the mobile industry as a standard middleware for mobile Peer-To-Peer intelligent agent applications completely interoperating on different terminals and networks Board Members

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved JADE Board Leading Principles –not-for-profit association –The Board is open and welcomes all companies and organizations that have a concrete business interest in the exploitation of JADE and that commit to its development and promotion –JADE APIs are public and its evolution is controlled by the Board –strength of the Open source process –a Consortium Agreement regulates copyright and IPR issues between members Activities of the Board –govern and implement the evolution of JADE through: the definition of public API’s, the development of the underlying software –decide on the content/functionalities of the JADE releases –specify the technical activities of the JADE Board Software Team –advise on the content of the JADE Web site –nominate and elect new Members

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Roadmap /3/03 3.0b1 JADE 3.0b1 consolidation of previous features integrated JADE and LEAP split container mode update for compliance to new FIPA standards persistent DF XMLCodec misc add-on 18/12/ JADE 3.1 consolidation of previous features tutorial for beginners + more documentation new service-based kernel based on a Distributed Composition Filter pattern support for replication of the main container support for application specific message persistency through the PersistentDeliveryService support for FIPA Propose, 2phase-commit interaction protocol HTTP, JMS MTPs Bean-generator, and RDFCodec add-ons JADE 3.2 consolidation of previous features security add-on including support for authentication, authorization, and end-to- end message integrity and confidentiality (J2SE only) HTTP MTP Test Suite Framework Persistent Service threaded behaviours agent loading from jar file logging SerializableOntology that handles homogeneously ontological concepts and serializable objects Automatic DF clean-up when a registered agent dies 15/7/ /12/ JADE 3.3 consolidation of previous features security add- on (J2ME) Web Service Integration Agent Launcher (Univ. Aachen) Performance Scalability

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Open issues and challenges Technical topics –JADE for ad-hoc networks –integration with SIP protocol and IMS network –JADE for embedded systems & machine-to-machine applications –Distributed security for J2ME-MIDP terminals (usage of JSR-177 API) Model and Tools for dealing with agent trust –Semantic-driven communication –Distributed workflow –Model and Visual tools to organize & deploy an application as a society of agents groups of agents, roles, norms, obligations, permissions –Interaction Protocols for distributed control and self-organization –Methodology & sw-engineering tools a complete environment from sw design to deployment Further increase the level of participation of the Open Source Community –deployment of some proper web-based tools (e.g. gforge) to allow access to the CVS repository, creation of sub-projects, forums, … –educational material, books, courses, tutorials and user workshops –integrating the contributions from the Community –providing support to the Community via –presenting JADE to proper forums & standards e.g. Java-ONE conference, OSGi framework, J2ME community, OMTP

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Foreseen impact on EU Strategic Objectives - IST Open source development and run-time environment, middleware and tools to support developers - IST Mobile and Wireless Systems Beyond 3G - IST Towards a global dependability and security framework - IST Semantic-based knowledge systems - IST Networked businesses and governments - IST Networked Embedded Systems - IST eHealth - IST Applications and Services for the Mobile User and Worker - IST-NMP-1 Fast and Flexibly Manufacturing Enterprise - … Technology-driven perspective Application-driven perspective

Brussels, 5/7/2004 CONFIDENTIAL – All rights reserved Conclusions JADE is a european-driven strong Open Source initiative – –60,000 downloads, 5+ s/day –governed by a Board of 5 members –broad deployment in several EU projects is the reference tool for AgentCities, AgentLink EU projects JADE has a potential impact on several IST strategic objectives –it can be the catalyst of several on-going R&D initiatives in Europe –the usage of a common open source technology facilitates harmonization and interoperability of sw developments Questions for the plenary discussion –How to increase the level of participation to the Open Source project? –How to increase the level of adoption in commercial deployments? –What the EU can do for JADE and what JADE can do for empowering the EU-vision?