WADE: a software platform to develop mission critical applications exploiting agents and workflows

Abstract

In this paper, we describe two mission critical applications currently deployed by Telecom Italia in the Operations Support System domains. The first one called Network Neutral Element Manager implements a mediation layer between network elements and OSS systems. The second one, known as Wizard, provides step-by-step guidance to technicians performing maintenance operations in the fields.Both applications have strong requirements in terms of scalability and flexibility and exploit the combination of agents and workflows to meet them. As such both of them are based on a common software platform called WADE (Workflows and Agents Development Environment). WADE is the main evolution of JADE a popular Open Source framework that facilitates the development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems. WADE adds to JADE the support for the execution of tasks defined according to the workflow metaphor and a number of mechanisms that help managing the complexity of the distribution both in terms of administration and fault tolerance. In this paper in particular we focus on the workflow aspect and we show how WADE tries to bring the workflow approach from the business process level to the level of system internal logic.