JACK Intelligent Agents is a framework in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

for multi-agent system development. JACK Intelligent Agents was built by Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd. (AOS) and is a third generation agent platform building on the experiences of the

Procedural Reasoning System In artificial intelligence, a procedural reasoning system (PRS) is a framework for constructing real-time reasoning systems that can perform complex tasks in dynamic environments. It is based on the notion of a rational agent or intelligent agent us ...

(PRS) and Distributed Multi-Agent Reasoning System (dMARS). JACK is one of the few multi-agent systems that uses the BDI software model and provides its own Java-based plan language and graphical planning tools.

History

JACK Intelligent Agents was initially developed in 1997 by ex-members of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII or A²I²) who were involved in the design, implementation, and application of PRS at

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as ...

and/or dMARS at the AAII. The JACK platform was written for commercial application of the multi-agent paradigm (a COTS product) to complex problem solving and was the basis for starting the company Agent Oriented Software (AOS) where it remains the flagship product.

Features

JACK Intelligent Agents is a mature commercial multi-agent platform that has been under active research, development, and domain-specific application for more than 10 years. The following provides a listing of the platform's key differentiating features. * Agent Run-time: The core of the platform is an extensible multi-agent run-time. Once domain specific agents, plans, events, capabilities, etc. are specified the JACK kernel manages the execution the system including message passing, reasoning, and meta-reasoning. * JACK Plan Language (JPL): JACK provides an agent-specific plan language for writing JACK plans (the discrete reasoning executed by agents). The plan language is an extension to the

and offers commands such as @send and @post for inter-agent messaging, as well as the management of actions, sub-tasks and maintenance of conditions. Plans are compiled into Java classes for execution in the JACK run-time offering speed and correctness of execution. * Belief-Desire-Intention Model: In addition to a classical (non-BDI) agent model, the platform realizes the BDI software model, where beliefs are managed by beliefsets encapsulated within agents, desires are the goal states an agent is aspiring to achieve, and intentions are the meta-reasoning and plan-based reasoning the JACK agents use to achieve the current goal. * Capabilities: The platform provides capabilities which are abstractions of common behaviors manifest as a complex of plans and events. Capabilities provide a way of conceptually bundling common behaviors and actions and re-using them between agents. * JACK Development Environment (JDE): Multi-agent systems can be written in Java code and the JACK plan language in a standard IDE, although the platform provides an agent-centric IDE called the JACK Development Environment or JDE. The JDE provides graphical tools for writing plans, connecting plans to agents, managing inter-agent communication, as well as compiling and running. The JDE also provides graphical tools for debugging and tracing the execution of plans and inter-agent message passing. * Graphical plans: A key feature of the JDE is the facility to write and manage graphical plans. These are the discrete reasoning performed by an agent represented graphically as a flow chart, allowing a programmer to manage the code performed in each step of the reasoning graph, and the subject matter expert to manage the logical flow of the reasoning based on the human-readable documentation on each node. * JACK Object Modeller (JACOB): An object serialization technology used by the JACK run-time for object initialization and inter-process communication. Java objects are serialized to human-readable

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

text, not too dissimilar to

YAML YAML ( and ) (''see '') is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Ext ...

and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

. * Platform Independence: The JACK platform is written in

, allowing the deployment of JACK multi-agent systems onto the wide array of platforms that support the

Java Virtual Machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describ ...

. Currently JACK can be installed on Microsoft Windows

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s only using a

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calcula ...

but works also on a

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A comp ...

. On the most recent versions of

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

s (starting from

Mac OS X Lion OS X Lion, also known as Mac OS X Lion, (version 10.7) is the eighth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. A preview of OS X 10.7 Lion was publicly shown at the "Back to the Mac" Apple Speci ...

) JACK can be installed only using a console installer.

Extensions

The JACK platform has been extended a number of times since its inception. Most of the extensions, such as JACK Teams and CoJACK were developed by or in collaboration with AOS. * JACK Teams: An extension to the BDI software model that facilitates agents collaborating in teams toward achieving a goal. Like JACK, JACK Teams supports its own plan language in what AOS refers to as ''Team-oriented programming''. JACK Teams is integrated into and available as a part of the JACK Intelligent Agents platform. * CoJACK: An extension to the JACK platform that adds a cognitive architecture to the agents for eliciting more realistic (human-like) behaviors in virtual environments. * FIPA JACK: An extension to the JACK platform to support the FIPA Agent Communications Language. * Prometheus: An agent-centric software engineering methodology for managing the SDLC of a multi-agent-based system. JACK was used as the basis for investigation, comparison, and testing the methodology. The Prometheus involved the development of the Prometheus Design Tool (PDT) which was a GUI-based tool for managing design concerns in the process. * JACK Eclipse Plug-in: A plug-in that facilitates the development of JACK-based systems in the

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ce ...

IDE. Specifically, the plug-in adds capabilities to Eclipse to support the JACK file types (such as .plan, .agent, etc.) as well support for JACK plan language. * JACK WebBot: An extension that embeds the JACK kernel in the Apache Tomcat web server allowing intelligent agents to be interacted with and formulate responses

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

requests (via the

Java Servlet A Jakarta Servlet (formerly Java Servlet) is a Java software component that extends the capabilities of a server. Although servlets can respond to many types of requests, they most commonly implement web containers for hosting web applicatio ...

API).

Notes

References

* Paolo Busetta, Ralph Ronnquist, Andrew Hodgson, and Andrew Lucas (1999
JACK Intelligent Agents – Components for Intelligent Agents in Java
AgentLink News, Issue 2. * Nick Howden, Ralph Rönnquist, Andrew Hodgson, Andrew Lucas (2001
JACK intelligent agents – Summary of an agent infrastructure
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents * P. Busetta, Ralph Rönnquist, Andrew Hodgson, Andrew Lucas (1999
Light-Weight Intelligent Software Agents in Simulation
in Proceedings of the Simulation Technology and Training (SimTecT 99), Melbourne, Australia * M. Winikoff (2005
JACK intelligent agents: An industrial strength platform
In Multi-Agent Programming. Springer. * J. Tweedale, N. Ichalkaranje, C. Sioutis, B. Jarvis, A. Consoli, G. Phillips-Wren,
Innovations in multi-agent systems

PDF
, Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Volume 30, Issue 3, August 2007, Pages 1089–1115 * Rick Evertsz, Martyn Fletcher, Richard Jones, Jacquie Jarvis, James Brusey, Sandy Dance
Implementing Industrial Multi-agent Systems Using JACK
in Programming Multi-Agent Systems (PROMAS) 2003: 18–48 * Øystein Spillum
A Comparison between JACK Intelligent Agents and JACK Teams Applied in Teamwork
Masters Thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, November 2008

External links

Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd. homepage
(AOS)
JACK Product webpage

– including user manuals and tutorials

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jack Intelligent Agents Java platform software Agent-based software Multi-agent systems