Zeus: A toolkit for building distributed multiagent systems

Abstract

T he multiagent systems approach of knowledge-level cooperation between autonomous agents promises signi cant bene ts to distributed systems engineering, such as enhanced interoperability, scalability, and recon gurability.However, thus far, because of the innate difficulty of constructing multiagent systems, this promise has been largely unrealized.Hence there is an emerging desire among agent developers to move away from developing point solutions to point problems in favor of developing methodologies and toolkits for building distributed multiagent systems.T his philosophy led to the development of the ZEUS Agent Building T oolkit, which facilitates the rapid development of collaborative agent applications through the provision of a library of agent-level components and an environment to support the agent-building process.T he ZEUS toolkit is a synthesis of established agent technologies with some novel solutions to provide an integrated collaborative agent-building environment.The notion of heterogeneous autonomous agents collaborating to solve problems is a powerful metaphor for the engineering of distributed and interoperable software systems.This agent-based approach introduces a new level of abstraction of knowledge-level cooperation between autonomous systems that enhances distributed systems interoperability, scalability, and recon gurability.However, thus far, the promise of the agent approach has been largely unrealized in the distributed software engineering community.This is due to a number of factors (including the current lack of standards for agent technology) but primarily to the inherent complexity of constructing collaborative agent systems.To facilitate large-scale realization of the collaborative agent approach to distributed software engineering, there is an urgent need for frameworks, methodologies, and toolkits that support the rapid development of multiagent systems (N dumu and Nwana, 1997): hence the recent explosion in the number of multiagent system development environments, frameworks, and