Cited by 308Multi-Agent Systems and NegotiationSimulation Techniques and ApplicationsAdvanced Software Engineering Methodologies

A Survey of Agent Platforms

Open access
Kravari, Kalliopi, Bassiliades, Nick·2015·Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

Abstract

From computer games to human societies, many natural and artificial phenomena can be represented as multi-agent systems. Over time, these systems have been proven a really powerful tool for modelling and understanding phenomena in fields, such as economics and trading, health care, urban planning and social sciences. However, although, intelligent agents have been around for years, their actual implementation is still in its early stages. Since the late nineties many agent platforms have been developed. Some of them have already been abandoned whereas others continue releasing new versions. On the other hand, the agent-oriented research community is still providing more and more new platforms. This vast amount of platform options leads to a high degree of heterogeneity. Hence, a common problem is how people interested in using multi-agent systems should choose which platform to use in order to benefit from agent technology. This decision was usually left to word of mouth, past experiences or platform publicity, lately however people depend on solid survey articles. To date, in most cases multi-agent system surveys describe only the basic characteristics of a few representatives without even providing any classification of the systems themselves. This article presents a comparative up-to-date review of the most promising existing agent platforms that can be used. It is based on universal comparison and evaluation criteria, proposing classifications for helping readers to understand which agent platforms broadly exhibit similar properties and in which situations which choices should be made.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18564/jasss.2661

Cites

2 of 2 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Definitions, implementations and use cases of IoT are creating a substrate for a general implementation of the Digital Twin concept beyond the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

    “Definitions, implementations and use cases of IoT are creating a substrate for a general implementation of the DT concept beyond the so-called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) [120].”

    From Digital Twin in the IoT Context: A Survey on Technical Features, Scenarios, and Architectural Models (2020) · cites this paper as [120]

    Section 2.3 discusses a future web in which people and things can communicate, but it does not address Digital Twins or IoT as a foundation for their implementation. Searches for Digital Twin, IoT, and IIoT found no passage in our copy supporting the attributed claim. (LLM, conf=0.75)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 27

  1. BELLIFEMINE, F., Caire, G., Poggi, A. & Rimassa, G. (2003). JADE: A white Paper. EXP in search of innovation, 3(3), 6-19.
  2. BORDINI, R., Hübner, J. & Wooldridge, M. (2007). Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. Wiley Series in Agent Technology. ISBN: 978-0-470-02900-8.
  3. BRAUBACH, L. & Pokahr, A. (2013). The Jadex Project: Simulation. Multiagent Systems and Applications, 45, 107-128. [doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33323-1_5] · DOI
  4. BRAUBACH, L., Pokahr, A. & Lamersdorf, W. (2014) Negotiation-Based Patient Scheduling in Hospitals -Reengineering Message-Based Interactions with Services. Advanced Intelligent Computational Technologies and Decision Support Systems, 486, 107-121. [doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00467-9_10] · DOI
  5. FININ, T., Fritzson, R., McKay, D. & McEntire, R. (1994). KQML as an agent communication language. Proceedings of the third international conference on Information and knowledge management -CIKM '94, p. 456. [doi:10.1145/191246.191322] · DOI
  6. GUPTA, R. & Kansal, G. (2011). A Survey on Comparative Study of Mobile Agent Platforms. In Int. Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (IJEST), 3(3), 1943-1948.
  7. GUTKNECHT, O. & Ferber, J. (2000). Madkit: a Generic Multi-Agent Platform. Autonomous Agents. AGENTS 2000, Barcelona, ACM Press, 78-79. [doi:10.1145/336595.337048 · DOI
  8. HELSINGER, A. & Wright, T. (2005). Cougaar: A Robust Configurable Multi Agent Platform. Aerospace Conference, IEEE, pp. 1- 10. [doi:10.1109/aero.2005.1559614 · DOI
  9. HIMMELSPACH, J. & Uhrmacher, A. M. (2007) Plug'n simulate. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Simulation Symposium. IEEE Computer Society, 137-143. [doi:10.1109/anss.2007. · DOI
  10. HIRSCH, B., Konnerth, T. & Heßler, A. (2009). Merging Agents and Services -the JIAC Agent Platform. InMulti-Agent Programming: Languages, Tools and Applications, 159-185. [doi:10.1007/978-0-387-89299-3_5 · DOI
  11. HOLZ, T., Campbell, A.G., O'Hare, G.M.P, Stafford, J.W., Martin, A. & Dragone, M. (2011). MiRA -Mixed Reality Agents. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 69(4), 251-268. [doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2010.10.001 · DOI
  12. KAMINKA, G. A. (2004). Robots are Agents, Too!. In Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 4.
  13. KLÜGL, F. (2009). SeSAm: Visual Programming and Participatory Simulation for Agent-Based Models. In. D. Weyns and A. Uhrmacher (eds) Agents, Simulations and Applications, chapter 16, Taylor and Francis.
  14. KRAVARI, K., Bassiliades, N. & Boley, H. (2012). Cross-Community Interoperation Between Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent Systems: A Study on EMERALD and Rule Responder. Journal of Expert Systems With Applications, 39(10), 9571-9587. [doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2012.02.160 · DOI
  15. KRAVARI, K., Kontopoulos, E. & Bassiliades, N. (2010). EMERALD: A Multi-Agent System for Knowledge-based Reasoning Interoperability in the Semantic Web. 6th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN 2010), Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, LNCS, 6040/2010, 173-182. [doi:10.1007/978-3-642-12842-4_21] · DOI
  16. KUBERA, Y., Mathieu, P. & Picault, S. (2010). Everything can be Agent!. Proceedings of the ninth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'2010), 1547-1548.
  17. LUKE, S., Cioffi-Revilla, C., Panait, L., Sullivan, K. & Balan, G. (2005). MASON: A Multi-Agent Simulation Environment. In Simulation: Transactions of the society for Modeling and Simulation International, 82(7), 517-527. [doi:10.1177/0037549705058073] · DOI
  18. NIKOLAI, C. & Madey, G. (2009). Tools of Trade: A Survey of Various Agent Based Modeling Platforms, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 12(2):2 <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/12/2/2.html>.
  19. NORTH, M.J., Howe, T.R., Collier, N.T. & Vos, J.R. (2007). A Declarative Model Assembly Infrastructure for Verification and Validation. In Advancing Social Simulation: The First World Congress (129-140). Springer, Heidelberg.
  20. OEY, M.A., van Splunter, S., Ogston, E., Warnier, M. & Brazier, F.M.T. (2010). A Framework for Developing Agent-Based Distributed Applications. Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT- 10), IEEE/WIC/ACM, 2, 470-474. [doi:10.1109/WI-IAT.2010.134] · DOI
  21. RUSSELL, S., Jordan, H., O'Hare, G.M.P. & Collier, R.W. (2011). Agent Factory: A Framework for Prototyping Logic-Based AOP Languages. In Proceedings of the Ninth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies (MATES 2011), 6973, 125- 136. [doi:10.1007/978-3-642-24603-6_13] · DOI
  22. SCHURR, N., Marecki, J., Tambe, M., Scerri, P., Kasinadhuni, N. & Lewis, J.P. (2005). The Future of Disaster Response: Humans Working with Multiagent Teams using DEFACTO (PDF). In AAAI Spring Symposium on AI Technologies for Homeland Security.
  23. SISLAK, D., Rehak, M., Pechoucek, M. & Pavlicek, D. (2006). Deployment of A-globe Multi-Agent Platform. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 1447-1448. [doi:10.1145/1160633.1160908 · DOI
  24. SUN, R. & Naveh, I., (2004). Simulating Organizational Decision-Making Using a Cognitively Realistic Agent Model. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 7(3), 5 <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/7/3/5.html>. Swarm (2014). Available at <http://www.swarm.org>. Archived at <http://www.webcitation.org/6QWgU1rxp>.
  25. SWARMFEST (2012). SDG's annual agent-based modeling conference. <http://www.swarm.org/index.php/Swarmfest_2012>. Archived at <http://www.webcitation.org/6QWgWxpcI>.
  26. TISUE, S. & Wilensky, U. (2004, updated 2013). NetLogo: Design and implementation of a multi-agent modeling environment. In Proceedings of the Agent 2004 Conference on Social Dynamics: Interaction, Reflexivity and Emergence, Chicago, Illinois.
  27. WINIKOFF, M. (2005). JACK intelligent agents: An industrial strength platform. In Multi-Agent Programming. Springer, 15, 175- 193.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Kravari, K., & Bassiliades, N.
Venue
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Published
2015
Volume
18
Issue
1
ISSN
1460-7425 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2165159570
Cited by
308
References
2
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 40 · 2020: 48 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 49 · 2017: 41 · 2016: 24 · 2015: 4
FWCI
38.58
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by-sa
Locations
  • Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (publishedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Simulation Techniques and Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
Keywords
agent platforms, multi-agent systems, intelligent agents, platform classification, platform selection, agent technology

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review