A role-based infrastructure for customised agent system development in supply networks

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for generic role identification and role reuse together with an infrastructure enabling rapid development of role-based multi-agent system (MAS) applications. The infrastructure includes a FIPA compliant runtime environment for role execution as well as a library of generic roles and interaction protocols (IPs) capturing generic agent behaviours and communication abilities. The library has been generated by applying the methodology for generic role identification to a set of real-world scenarios from three different industrial domains, encompassing different aspects of collaboration in supply networks. Developers build their applications for the runtime environment by reusing and extending roles and IPs from this library. © 2004 IEEE.