| Over the last decade the popularity of agent-based systems has increased rapidly because agents bring intelligence, reasoning and autonomy to software systems. Agents are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications. A number of Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) frameworks have been proposed. These frameworks aim at providing software engineering support to multiagent systems development including agent communication. In this research, a communication layer for the AOSE framework has been proposed. The proposed framework is a JAVA-based communication subsystem developed on top of JADE and uses FIPA Performatives for communication. JADE provides a rich set of API's for agent development, but it requires a learning curve and certain amount of effort. Using the proposed framework, the agent developer can incorporate the message sending and receiving functionality by inheriting few trivial classes; the rest is handled by the communication sub-system. The agent developer can focus on more intricate tasks in agent development like plan generation, continual updating of goals, etc. |
