Mission Statement

Intelligent agents are a modelling paradigm, based on the notion of agents with mental states. The Jadex reasoning engine follows the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) model and facilitates easy intelligent agent construction with sound software engineering foundations. It allows for programming intelligent software agents in XML and Java and can be deployed on different kinds of middleware such as JADE.

To enable the creation of intelligent agents several different constituent parts have to be assembled. It is necessary to provide an agent architecture that at least takes into account agent-internal, agent society and artificial intelligence (AI) concepts. It is a property of agent research that interesting research results in various isolated areas exist, but that these results are not integrated into superordinated architectures. Therefore until now no standards can address the construction of intelligent agents in all facets.

The Jadex project accomodates these properties with an open research map, that outlines the research areas of interest and the actual work in progress in these fields. In the spirit of an open-source project everyone is invited to contribute his/her ideas and practical improvements.

Summary

The Jadex research project is conducted by the Distributed Systems and Information Systems Group at the University of Hamburg. The developed software framework is available under GNUs LGPL license, and is continuously evolving. The project's file releases and community support tools are kindly hosted by the sourceforge.net portal. The reasoning engine has been put into practice in the context of several research, teaching, and industrial application scenarios some of which are described on this page.

Jadex Release 0.96 Available

This release contains all the features and improvements from earlier betas as described below.
In addition it comes with a complete set of updated documentation material.

- New protocols capability: request (iterated) contract net dutch/english auctions
- New support for agent-level unit-testing including new TestCenter plugin
- New plugin for JadexDoc for easy documentation generation
- New DFBrowser plugin for inspecting registered agents
- New booktrading example
- Added end-states allowing for executing BDI-relevant actions before an agent dies
- Added agent listeners that enable listening on BDI-elements
- Added custom match expressions for message events and plan triggers
- Numerous bugfixes and improvements

(June 15, 2007)

Jadex 0.96-beta1 Available

This beta release contains the latest features and improvements as described below. Note that the documentation has not yet been updated but will be completed for the final version soon.

- Improved protocols capability: (iterated) contract net dutch/english auctions
- New end-states for agents. They allow for executing BDI-relevant actions before an agent dies
- New agent listener facilities that enable adding listeners on agents and and BDI-elements
- Reduced start-up time of JCC through lazy plugin loading
- New plugin for JadexDoc tool that facilitates the documentation generation
- Enhanced starter allows quick start agents
- Enhanced testcenter allows performing parallel tests for quick test suite runs
- Numerous bugfixes and improvements

(March 20, 2007)

Jadex 0.95-beta1 Available

This beta release contains the latest features and bugfixes as described below. Note that the documentation has not yet been updated.

- Added strong exports as default and introduced new keyword ("shielded") for old weak exports
(allows http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1513898&forum_id=274112).
- Initial version of protocols capability currently supporting request and contract-net protocols.
- New booktrading example as described in JADE book chapter on Jadex.
- Introduced recur recurdelay for all goals (not only maintain).
- Added custom match expressions for message events.
- Added custom match expressions for plan trigger (e.g. goals or events).
- Added DFBrowser plugin to inspect registered agents.
- Added RMAPlugin to show JADE RMA in JCC.
- Added first version of test suite support.
- Implemented nugget codec as replacement for the slow java xml codec.
- Introduced alternatives to fail() method containing exception or message.
- Introduced explicit applicable candidates list (APL) and "recalculate" BDI flag for goals
- JCC is now able to introspect itself.
- Implemented automatic reloading of model cache based on file dates.
- Numerous bugfixes

(July 07, 2006)