JADE: A software framework for developing multi-agent applications ...

Available online at www.sciencedirect.comInformation and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21www.elsevier.com/locate/infsofJADE: A software framework for developing multi-agentapplications. Lessons learnedFabio Bellifemine a, *, Giovanni Caire a , Agostino Poggi b , Giovanni Rimassa ca Telecom Italia, Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274, I-10148, Torino, Italyb Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze, 181A, I-43100, Parma, Italyc Whitestein Technologies (formerly he was at University of Parma), Pestalozzistrasse 24, CH-8032, Zürich, SwitzerlandAvailable online 22 October 2007AbstractSince a number of years agent technology is considered one of the most innovative technologies for the development of distributedsoftware systems. While not yet a mainstream approach in software engineering at large, a lot of work on agent technology has beendone, many research results and applications have been presented, and some software products exists which have moved from theresearch community to the industrial community. One of these is JADE, a software framework that facilitates development of interoperableintelligent multi-agent systems and that is distributed under an Open Source License. JADE is a very mature product, used by aheterogeneous community of users both in research activities and in industrial applications. This paper presents JADE and its technologicalcomponents together with a discussion of the possible reasons for its success and lessons learned from the somewhat detachedperspective possible nine years after its inception.Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Keywords: Agent technology; Open source software; Distributed systems1. IntroductionSince a number of years, researchers have promised thatagent technology will give an important contribution todistributed software systems by simplifying their developmentand by allowing smarter, more flexible and efficientapplications. While not yet a mainstream approach in softwareengineering at large, a lot of work on agent technologieshas been done, a lot of research and applicationresults have been presented and some software productshave moved from the research community to the industrialcommunity. One of these products is JADE ([1,2,18]), asoftware framework to facilitate the development of interoperableintelligent multi-agent systems that is used by a* Corresponding author. Tel.: +390112286175; fax: +390112286190.E-mail addresses: fabioluigi.bellifemine@telecomitalia.it (F. Bellifemine),giovanni.caire@telecomitalia.it (G. Caire), poggi@ce.unipr.it(A. Poggi), gri@whitestein.com (G. Rimassa).heterogeneous community of users as a tool for both supportingresearch activities and building real applications.The initial software developments, that eventually createdthe JADE platform, were started by Telecom Italia(formerly CSELT) together with the University of Parmain July’98, motivated by the need to validate FIPA specifications[14] through a concrete compliant implementation.The project also aimed at realizing a middleware forapplication development that, as one of the main challenges,put great emphasis on usability and simplicityof its API’s such as it was usable not just by its programmer’steam but also by other programmers withoutextensive experience in the FIPA specifications andmulti-agent systems theory. In order to increase its diffusionin the communities of FIPA and of agent systemsdevelopers, and in order to facilitate its usage also incommercial products, in 2000 JADE went Open Sourcedistributed by Telecom Italia under the LGPL (GNULesser General Public License) license [20]. After that,JADE grew both in usage and in offered functionalities0950-5849/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2007.10.008

F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21 11and performances, thanks also to the contributions (e.g.bug reporting and fixing, code extensions, etc.) of thelarge community of users that, as depicted in Fig. 1,counts today more than 120,000 downloads from the officialweb site [18]. Fig. 1 shows how the number of downloadsfrom the official JADE web site progressed aftereach release (the version number is reported close to eachplotted point). The latest version of JADE is 3.5, releasedon 25 June 2007. As for most open source projects, it isvery difficult to estimate the real number of users but itcan be said that, even after 7 years of activity, the userforum is still very active with an average of 4exchanged e-mails/days.As a matter of fact, an important topic in multi-agentsystems research is the development of programming languagesand tools for the realization of such systems; inthe last decade, more than a hundred of such tools havebeen realized. However, most of them were created asshort-term research activity and their development andmaintenance ended after only two or three years. [7] is arecent survey on multi-agent languages and platforms,while a short list of tools that are still active projects andthat, in our opinion, represent related work of JADE, arethe followings: Cougaar [16], JACK [24], 3APL [12], andAgent Factory [22].Cougaar [16] is an agent architecture developed undertwo DARPA programs in the domain of military logisticsplanning and execution. It is a Java-based framework forlarge-scale and flexible distributed agent-based applications.It uses a flexible component model to dynamicallyload components by inserting component ‘‘binder’’ proxiesto mediate interactions with system services. It also uses amulti-tiered interaction model: within agents, componentsinteract via a local publish-subscribe mechanism, whileinter-agent communication happens via message passing.Moreover, Cougaar enables both dynamic negotiation ofagent relationships via a hierarchical service discoverymechanism and the organization of agents intocommunities.JACK [24] is a commercial software development frameworkfor the realization of BDI agent-based systems [21].Rather than using a logic-based language, it extends theJava language through a set of syntactic constructs to dealwith agent plans and agent beliefs. JACK offers a gooddegree of modularization through the composition of agentplans and the concept of agent teams. It provides also a setof development tools allowing, for example, the editing ofagent code through a dedicated editor and a graphical planeditor that allows the construction of a plan via visual componentssimilar to state charts.3APL [12] is a programming language for implementingagent-based systems via programming constructs to dealwith agents’ beliefs, goals, basic capabilities (such as beliefupdates, external actions, or communication actions) andvia a set of practical reasoning rules through which agents’goals can be updated or revised. 3APL is integrated withinan IDE that helps a programmer to write the programsthat implement the individual agents, to execute such programsin either a step-by-step or continuous mode, and tomonitor their execution by accessing agent internal stateand tracing the messages exchanged by the agents. It is alsowell integrated with Prolog and Java programminglanguages.Agent Factory [22] is also based upon BDI concepts andit also includes an interpreter embedded within a distributedFIPA-compliant Run-Time Environment that allowsthe deployment of agents on desktops and servers, personaldigital assistants, and mobile phones. Agent Factory providesa set of tools to help programmers in the developmenttasks; in particular, a tool for the construction of agentsfrom a set of UML sequence diagrams and a suite of toolsthat facilitate the testing and debugging of applications.In our opinion, three are the main identifying features ofJADE in comparison with the rest of the state of the art:Fig. 1. Cumulative number of downloads after each software release. (the version number is reported close to each plotted point).

12 F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21– Firstly, JADE is completely based upon the FIPA specifications,so much so that, given also its history, it isoften identified with the FIPA specifications itself.– Then, JADE provides a proper set of functionalities tosimplify development of multi-agent systems but it putsvery few restrictions on the user code without, in particular,imposing any specific agent architecture. Thatmeans users do no need either to understand or useany BDI architecture, architecture which exists in literaturein hundreds of flavours and that has not yet gainedacceptance in the software engineering community.Users must simply use and write Java code without needto learn any new special construct.– Finally, JADE can be deployed both on JEE, JSE, andJME devices and its runtime provides a homogeneousset of APIs that is independent of the underlying networkand Java technology.This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describesthe JADE agent architecture and its main features. Section3 shows how JADE enables agents to adapt to mobile environmentcharacteristics and to devices with limited memoryand processing power. Section 4 discusses theintegration of agents with other technologies, in particularWeb Services and reasoning systems. Section 5 discusses,with an historical perspective, the possible and likely reasonsfor the widespread usage of JADE; particular care isdevoted to those non-technical aspects which might representlessons learned of general usefulness to other projects.Section 6 gives an overview of an industrial application inthe field of network management, and it presents some ofthe reasons that led to the selection of JADE as developmentframework for that system. Finally, Section 7 concludesthe paper and outlines some future work.2. JADE software architectureThe JADE architecture is firmly rooted in peer-to-peerideas and communication patterns [2]. The intelligence,the initiative, the information, the resources and the controlcan be fully distributed across a group of heterogeneoushosts, including mobile terminals and PDAs, bothin the wireless and in the wired network. The environmentcan evolve dynamically with peers, i.e. agents, which canappear and disappear in the system according to applicationneeds and requirements. Communication betweenthe peers, regardless of whether they are running in thewireless or wired network, is completely symmetric, eachpeer being able to play both the initiator and the responderrole.The JADE component model organizes applications asstructured ensembles of software components, whichbelong to two categories:– Agents – These are the peers mentioned above, exhibitingautonomy and communicating through asynchronousmessage passing.– Services – These are non-autonomous components,which can run on a single node or cooperatively on multiplenodes, and whose operations can be triggered byagents.JADE is fully developed in Java and, from a softwareengineering standpoint, values highly, among others, thefollowing driving principles:– Interoperability – JADE is compliant with the FIPAspecifications [14]. As a consequence, JADE agentscan interoperate with other agents, provided that theycomply with the same standard.– Uniformity and portability – JADE provides a homogeneousset of APIs that are independent from the underlyingnetwork and Java version. More in details, theJADE run-time provides the same APIs both for theJEE, JSE and JME environment. In theory, applicationdevelopers could decide at deploy-time which Java runtimeenvironment to use.– Easy to use – The complexity of the middleware is hiddenbehind a simple and intuitive set of APIs.– Pay-as-you-go philosophy – Programmers do not need touse all the features provided by the middleware. Featuresthat are not used do not require programmers toknow anything about them, neither they add any computationaloverhead.JADE includes both the libraries (i.e. the Java classes)required to develop application agents, and the run-timeenvironment that provides the basic services and thatmust be active on the device before agents can be executed.Each instance of the JADE run-time is called container(since it ‘‘contains’’ agents). The set of allcontainers is called platform and provides a homogeneouslayer that hides to agents (and to applicationdevelopers as well) the complexity and the diversity ofthe underlying tiers (hardware, operating system, typeof network, JVM). Fig. 2 draws the architecture of aJADE agent system deployed on a set of heterogeneouscomputing nodes.The JADE design choice (in particular not to committoo strongly to specific agent architectures) and its modulararchitecture allowed JADE to fit the constraints of environmentswith limited resources. JADE has however alsobeen integrated into complex server-side infrastructuressuch as .NET ([18], see FAQ section on the Web Site)and JEE [10] where JADE becomes a service to executemulti-party proactive applications. The limited memoryfootprint allows installing JADE on all mobile phones providedthat they are Java-enabled. The JADE run-timememory footprint, in a MIDP1.0 environment, is around120 KB, but can be further reduced to 50 KB by usingthe ROMizing technique ([4,5]), i.e. by compiling JADEtogether with the JVM. Analyses and a benchmark of scalabilityand performance of the JADE Message TransportSystem can be found in [9,23].

F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21 13Multi-agent ApplicationJADEContainerContainerContainerContainerContainerJavaJEEJEEJSEJME CDCJME CLDCFig. 2. The architecture of a JADE agent system.From the functional point of view, JADE provides thebasic services for distributed peer-to-peer applications inthe wired and mobile environment. JADE allows eachagent to dynamically discover other agents and to communicatevia the peer-to-peer paradigm. From an applicationpoint of view, each agent is identified via a unique nameand it provides a set of services. It can register and modifyits services and/or search for agents providing a given service;it can also control its life cycle and, in particular, communicatewith all other peers.Agents communicate by asynchronous messageexchange, a communication model almost universallyaccepted for distributed and loosely coupled interactions,i.e. between heterogeneous entities. In order to communicate,an agent just sends a message to a destination. Agentsare identified by a name, therefore the send operation doesnot need the destination object reference and, as a directconsequence, there is no temporal dependency betweencommunicating agents. The sender and the receiver couldbe available at different times. The receiver may not evenexist (or not yet exist) or could not be directly known bythe sender that can specify a property (e.g. ‘‘all agents interestedin football’’) as a destination. Because agents identifyeach other only by name, any change at run-time of theirobject reference is fully transparent to applications.Despite this type of communication, security can be preservedvia suitable mechanisms to authenticate and verify‘‘rights’’ assigned to agents. When needed, therefore, anapplication can verify the identity of the sender of a messageand prevent actions that a principal is not allowedto perform (for instance an agent may be allowed to receivemessages from another agent, but not to send messages toit). All messages exchanged between agents are carried outwithin an envelope including only the information requiredby the transport layer. That allows, among others, toencrypt the content of a message separately from theenvelope.The structure of a message complies with the AgentCommunication Language (ACL) defined by FIPA [14]and includes fields (such as variables indicating the contexta message refers to, and time limits within which an answerhas to be received) aimed at supporting complex interactionsand multiple parallel conversations. In order to supportthe implementation of complex conversations, JADEprovides a set of skeletons of typical interaction patternsto perform specific tasks, such as negotiations, auctionsand task delegation. By using these skeletons (implementedas Java abstract classes and identified as ‘interaction protocols’),programmers can get rid of the burden of dealingwith synchronization issues, timeouts, error conditionsand, in general, all those aspects not strictly related tothe application logic. In order to facilitate the creationand handling of message content, JADE provides supportfor automatically converting back and forth between formatssuitable for content exchange, including XML andRDF, and the format suitable for content manipulation(i.e. Java objects). This support is integrated with someontology creation tools, e.g. Protégé, to enable programmersto graphically create their ontology and validate themessages exchanged by the agents of the system (see chapter13.1 of [1]).In order to increase scalability and also to meet the constraintsof limited resource environments (such as mobilephones), JADE adopts a thread-per-agent concurrencymodel, where a single Java thread is assigned to an agentto execute all its tasks as opposite to a thread-per-conversation(or per-task) model. Each agent has an embeddedround-robin scheduler of Behaviour objects where theBehaviour class is the reification of an agent task representinga scheduling and execution unit. Scheduling is cooperative,that is a Behaviour is not executed until the previousone yields control back to the scheduler. Structural compositionof agent behaviours is implemented by applying theComposite and the Chain of Responsibility patterns [15]to active objects task scheduling: hierarchical trees ofBehaviour objects can be composed where each intermediatenode can freely implement its policy to schedule the elementsbelonging to its sub-tree. In this way, several

14 F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21elementary tasks can be combined at run-time to formcomplex structures of task scheduling, including a set ofconcurrent Finite State Machines.In the JSE and Personal Java environments, JADE supportsmobility of code and execution state (see Chapter 6 of[1]). An agent can stop running on a host, migrate on a differentremote host (without the need to have the agent codealready installed on that host), and restart its executionfrom the point it was interrupted (actually, JADE implementsa form of not-so-weak mobility because a standardJVM does not enable saving the stack and the programcounter). This functionality allows, for example, distributingcomputational load at runtime by moving agents to lessloaded machines without any impact on the application.The platform also includes a naming service (ensuringeach agent has a unique name) and a yellow pages servicethat can be distributed across multiple hosts. Federationgraphs can be created in order to define structured domainsof agent services. Another very important feature consistsin the availability of a rich suite of graphical tools supportingboth debugging and management/monitoring. Bymeans of these tools, it is possible to remotely controlagents, even if already deployed and running: agent conversationscan be emulated, exchanged messages can besniffed, tasks can be monitored, and agent life-cycle canbe controlled.3. Specializing JADE agents for the mobile environmentAs already mentioned, the JADE run-time can be executedon a wide class of devices ranging from servers tocell phones, for the latter the only requirement beingthe availability of Java MIDP1.0 (or later versions). Inorder to properly address the memory and processingpower limitations of mobile devices and the characteristicsof wireless networks (GPRS in particular) in terms ofbandwidth, latency, intermittent connectivity and IPaddresses variability, and at the same time in order tobe efficient when executed on wired network hosts, JADEcan be configured to adapt to the characteristics of thedeployment environment. JADE architecture, in fact, iscompletely modular and, by activating certain modulesinstead of others, it is possible to meet different requirementsin terms of connectivity, memory and processingpower.More in details, a module called LEAP allows optimisingall communication mechanisms when dealing withdevices with limited resources and connected through wirelessnetworks. By activating this module, a JADE containeris ‘‘split’’, as depicted in Fig. 3, into a front-end running inthe mobile terminal and a back-end running in the wirednetwork. A suitable architectural element, called mediator,is in charge of instantiating and maintaining the back-ends.To better face high workload situations, it is possible todeploy several mediators, each of them managing a set ofback-ends. Each front-end is linked to its correspondingback-end through a permanent bi-directional connection.It is important to note that it makes no difference at all,to application developers, whether an agent is deployedon a normal container or on the front-end of a split container,since both the available functionality and the APIsare exactly the same. This approach has a number ofadvantages:– Part of the functionality of a container is delegated tothe back-end and, as a consequence, the front-endbecomes extremely lightweight in terms of requiredmemory and processing power.Fig. 3. JADE architecture for the mobile environment.

16 F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21AgentServiceDescriptionServiceDescriptionOntologyWSDLOperations:- Action-1……- Action-nAction-1…Action-nFig. 4. Mapping between DF Service-Description and WSDL.BDI [21] is a well-known model for cognitive intelligentagents where agents are specified in terms of three explicitmental attitudes: beliefs, desires, and intentions. The JADESemantics add-on (JSA) (see Chapter 12 of [1]), developedby France Telecom, implements on top of JADE theBDI-like agent abstraction used for the formal specificationof the FIPA ACL semantics. Agents can infer deductionsfrom perceived events and they can accordinglymodify agent’s beliefs and behaviours; message receivingis just another type of event and message sending is justanother type of action whose respective meaning is internallyrepresented as FIPA-SL logical formulae and automaticallyinterpreted by the JSA add-on according to theFIPA ACL formal semantics. For instance, without anyadditional line of code, a JSA agent is able to answer anyquery about a fact it was previously been informed of.With reference to Fig. 5, agent programming in JSArequires the following three steps: (i) implementing application-specificinterpretation capabilities which infer deductionsfrom events, (ii) implementing the applicationspecificagent beliefs which are facts to be asserted intothe agent belief base, (iii) implementing the know-how ofthe agent which is composed of the ontological actions itis able to perform and their post-conditions and feasibilitypre-conditions. The JSA add-on provides to programmersseveral points of extension, specialization, and customizationin order to fit different software design requirements,such as specialization of the interpretation algorithm andof the belief handling mechanism.5. Lessons learnedSoftware agent technology is still a niche sector of thesoftware programming science, however, in this sector,JADE can arguably be considered the most popular softwareagent platform available today. Several companieshave used and continue to use it in the context of verydifferent application domains, including networkActions TableCommunicativeActionsBeliefsBaseOntologicalActionsRx Message(FIPA ACL)SemanticRepresentationLogical Formulae(FIPA SL)SemanticInterpretationTx Message(FIPA ACL)Semantic InterpretationPrinciplesApplication specificAction featuresBelief transferIntention transferPlanningSubscriptionBelief assertionFig. 5. Schematic dataflow of the JSA interpretation behaviour.

F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21 17management, supply chain management, rescue management,fleet management, health care, auctions, tourism,etc. (see, for example, [8,17,19,25]). For instance, BritishTelecommunication’s Intelligent Systems Research Centreuses JADE as the core platform of mPower [19], a multiagentsystem that is used by BT engineers to support cooperationbetween mobile workers and team-based job management,i.e. teams rather than individuals receive jobassignments and team members must cooperatively managethe assigned jobs. Several universities use JADE,exploiting its Open Source availability and its technicalexcellence, both to study and teach the strength of the softwareagent technology and to extend its functionalities withnew add-ons (see, for example, Chapters 11 and 13 of [1]).This section discusses, looking back, possible reasonsfor the diffusion of JADE, in particular those non-technicalaspects which might represent useful lessons learned ofgeneral applicability, with the possibility to benefit otherfuture projects.5.1. Standard compliance and timingJADE complies with the FIPA specifications [14] thatenable end-to-end interoperability between agents of differentagent platforms. All applications where inter-organizationcommunication is needed can benefit frominteroperability, including e.g. machine-to-machine andholonic manufacturing. As a matter of fact, the JADE projectstarted with the goal of validating the FIPA specificationseven if its functionalities soon went much far beyondthe standard, even because of the slower evolution of thelatter. Surely with some degree of happenstance, the projectstarted at the right timing, and JADE and FIPA wereable to realize in early 2000 a symbiosis where JADE validatedFIPA specifications, provided new requirements, andoften even offered concrete solutions to specification problems;FIPA, on the other hand, provided a sound theoreticalfoundation for the JADE technology and contributedto the spread of it. A technology becomes a standard aftera consensus process between all participating organizations,often the standard status provides the energy formarket acceptance of a new technology; as such, standardcompliance represented a risk reduction factor and a facilitatorto create a ‘market of early adopters’ of thetechnology.5.2. Openness and licenseJADE is distributed in Open Source under the LGPLlicense [20]. Looking back, the choice of this license contributedto JADE widespread acceptance because itassured all the basic rights and duties [20] to facilitate theusage of the software, included usage in commercial products.Unlike the GPL, the LGPL license does not put anyrestriction on software that uses JADE (as opposite to softwarebased upon it), and allows proprietary software to bemerged with JADE. This was again a risk reduction factorfor users and contributed to the adoption of JADE inR&D projects, as well as in commercial projects, whichhad the chance to start using JADE even if the licensingstrategy of the software they were going to produce wasnot yet defined. Of course, openness had to be properlymanaged in order to avoid anarchy and avoid appearanceof multiple branches of the same software and differentvariations of the same API: a lot of effort was spent topromptly incorporate user feedbacks and integrate proposedfunctionalities and add-ons.5.3. User support and documentationIt is a common pitfall to distribute software in OpenSource without properly considering the need to supportusers and to provide them adequate documentation. Sinceits beginning, great care and relevant effort was put toanswer to questions and requests of support from users.Furthermore, the code was distributed together with a programmingguide and an administrator guide, a number ofexamples and tutorial, and the complete javadoc of all userAPIs. Looking back, availability of good documentationand prompt user support should be considered since thebeginning of an Open Source Project.5.4. Dissemination strategyOften the decision of a project to go Open Source representsthe dissemination strategy. According to our experience,the decision of licensing open source does notrepresent per se a valid dissemination strategy; possibly,it does not represent at all a dissemination strategy that,instead, must be properly defined to support such a licensingdecision through an adequate analysis of the target userbase. In most cases, open source projects are the output ofresearch projects and, as such, at their beginning, they targeta niche market of early innovators that like to play withcool software based on new concepts; JADE targeted earlyadopters of the FIPA standard and the main disseminationchannels were the standard organization itself and, underbudget restrictions, scientific events, mainly through papersat conferences. It may look somewhat counterintuitive but,in our opinion, in the early stage of an innovative project,the emerging user community is better seeded with coolnessand novelty rather than comprehensiveness and robustness;these two qualities are however needed to pass tothe second phase of dissemination towards those companiesthat wish to leverage the technology to add value totheir products. Notice that, even if this second phase isthe phase of major concern on getting advantages and revenues,industry adoption of a novel technology is stronglyfacilitated by the presence of competitors that share thesame goal of increasing the level of awareness of the technology.Considered that the main business of Telecom Italiais based on services rather then sale of softwareproducts, we decided to exploit the free open source natureof JADE in order to get contributions to improve and

18 F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21strengthen the software that we used, and we continue touse, as a middleware to develop Telecom Italia proprietaryvalue added services. In this phase of dissemination we targetedmainly R&D projects, such as those supported by theEuropean Commission; the JADE Web site [18] reports apartial list of EU projects that decided to use JADE anda list of main contributors.5.5. ExtensibilityThe stereotypical JADE user is a software programmerwith medium–high skills and strong attitude towards innovation,considered that he/she is using a niche technology.He/she is surely someone who likes to ‘play’ with software,likes to look inside the code and likes to have the possibilityof extending it. A nice-to-have feature for this kind of userwas surely the presence in JADE of well defined mechanismsfor code extension in form of published APIs, suchas the jade.mtp API which enables programmers to plugnew message transport protocols. These extension points,on one hand made workable for multiple contributors toenhance the platform without creating conflicts, and onthe other hand made the software more appealing to skilledprogrammers who could enjoy themselves by integratingand adding to JADE the results of their research. If extensibilitywas a strength of JADE, it must be said that aweakness of the project was instead the limits of the toolsfor collaborative software development: a lack of toolsadministrator and the presence of some company’s policiesfor network restrictions (e.g. firewall) made collaborativedevelopment sometimes difficult as several processes (e.g.account management) had to be done manually insteadof automatically. Considering the above described user stereotype,this was surely perceived as a weakness.5.6. Java languageIf today the use of the Java language can be consideredquite a common choice, in 1998, when JADE developmentstarted, that choice required some considerations as an easierchoice would have been the C language. Looking back,the choice of the Java language surely contributed to thespread acceptance of JADE as the majority of multi-agentsystems software developers embraced and still continuesto use this programming language.5.7. Quick learning curve and perceived valueUsers do not like dedicating too much time to learnusing new software; when the software is free, they tendto dedicate even fewer time as they do not even have thefinancial motivation of protecting their purchase investment.JADE API proved easy enough to learn and use. Itprovides a lot of functionalities and was designed withorthogonality and separation of concerns in mind [2]: eachset of API serves a specific purpose and is independent ofother functionalities, therefore, programmers need tounderstand only those parts of the API that implementtheir required functionalities. Programming the ‘‘helloworld’’ agent typically requires less than one hour and inthis time the programmer can already experience somevalue from using the framework. JADE has been designedto simplify the management of communication and messagetransport by making transparent to the developerthe management of the different communication layersused to send a message from an agent to another agent,and so allowing her/him to concentrate on the logic ofthe application. Of course, the effect of this feature is tosimplify and speed up application development withrespect to the time necessary to develop the same applicationby using only Java standard packages. In particular,when developing distributed applications for mobile terminals,JADE API and ready-to-use features allow stronglyreducing the application development time and costs: someestimations have been given that indicate reduction ofdevelopment time up to 30%.5.8. VersatilitySeveral R&D projects, that analysed all available platformsbefore selecting JADE, considered versatility andJME availability one of the major strengths of JADE. Asa matter of fact, JADE provides a homogeneous set ofAPIs that are independent from the underlying networkand Java technology (JEE, JSE or JME). It was appreciatedthat application developers can reuse the same applicationcode both for a PC, a PDA or a Java phone, andthey can postpone this choice as late as possible, ideallyuntil deployment time. JADE was JME-ready already atthe beginning of year 2003 thanks to the involvement ofsome major mobile manufacturers like Motorola and Siemenswithin the framework of the LEAP European Project[4,5].5.9. Backward compatibilityRegarding this aspect, two lessons were learned: fewusers like open source projects with frequent versionreleases, and all users hate introduction of backwardincompatibilities. Seventeen release versions of JADE havebeen released in its 7-year-long life: at the beginning quiteoften, then every 6 months, now with a target of 1 newrelease per year. Great care was given to preserve backwardcompatibility, even when significant jumps in functionalitywere granted. Only three times the major version numberhad to be increased (from JADE 1.x to JADE 3.x) to notifyusers the introduction of backward incompatibilities whichneeded modifications to their software. These three timeswere though still remembered by many users even if guidelineswere provided to upgrade user software. How backwardcompatibility can be preserved through releaseversions? The only suggestion we can provide is to carefullyidentify, reduce in number and in content, and have greatcare in designing, all public APIs, so that implementations

F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–21 19as well as subsequent possible extensions do not impact theAPI itself. Remind that ‘‘Public APIs are forever and youhave just one chance to get it right’’ [6]!6. A sample application: the network neutral elementmanagerTelecom Italia adopted JADE as the reference frameworkfor an important project in the field of networkmanagement [11]. The project involves about 30 peoplefor 3 years with the goal of creating a mediation layer,identified as Network Neutral Element Manager(NNEM), to decouple Operations Support Systems(OSS) from the network equipments and functionalities,as depicted in Fig. 6. For telecom operators with ahighly variegated multi-vendor network, as Telecom Italiais, this approach brings some important advantages.First of all, the provision of a uniform view over adiversity of technologies (IP, ATM...), network equipments(DSLAM, Router...), management protocols(SNMP, TL1...), vendors and software versions, sensiblyreduces the cost of adaptation of OSS chains to changesin the network. For instance, when an equipment of anew vendor is introduced, the logic of interactions withits equipments does no longer need to be replicated inall OSS systems, but it is shared within the mediationlayer. As a direct consequence, it is possible to acceleratethe rollout of new technologies and services, whichis a key success factor in a highly competitive marketsuch as that of telecommunications. Furthermore, havinga single system actually interacting with the networkmakes it possible to keep control over the accesses tonetwork equipments thus avoiding managementoverload.The NNEM deployment in Telecom Italia today coversthe IP broadband access domain and serves the activationand troubleshooting processes. The plan is to progressivelyextend it to other domains and processes starting from thenew generation network for ultra broadband access thatsupports rates up to 50 Mb/s. In order to achieve suchrates, this new network is based on the Fiber-to-the-buildingarchitecture. Fiber cables are extended up to user buildingswhere proper network elements, called ONU andtypically located in the building cellars, act as multiplexerbetween copper twisted pairs connecting flats and the opticalfiber.Today NNEM manages about 10,000 devices, with theintroduction of the new generation network it will haveto deal with about 100,000 devices and even more (oneper building). As a consequence, scalability is a key requirementfor the NNEM. Thanks to its distributed nature,JADE is particularly suited to create applications thatrun on distributed low cost architectures, such as blade,and therefore it perfectly meets the scalability requirement.Scalability was certainly the main reason that led to theusage of JADE as the basis for the NNEM, but other reasonswere identified and had an impact on the final choice,such as:– capability to serve well both reactive processes, such asactivation and troubleshooting, and proactive processes,such as alarm handling;– capability of executing long and fairly complex taskssuch as network element configurations upload (consideringresponse times and network latency this processcan take up to one hour);– capability of automatically exposing agent capabilitiesas Web Services by means of the WSIG add-ondescribed in Section 4 and therefore simple integrationwith the above OSS systems.After two years of intensive developments and testing inthe scope of the NNEM project, the following considerationscan be drawn.ActivationPerformancemonitoringTroubleshootingFaultManagementUniform viewNNEM (JADE-based Mediation Layer)Mobile NetworkATM-FRNASIData NetworkINAUDBSGUSoftSwitchSGTVoice NetworkDSLAMSDHPDHWDMTransport and AccessNetworkFig. 6. The network neutral element manager.

20 F. Bellifemine et al. / Information and Software Technology 50 (2008) 10–216.1. RobustnessIn general JADE is a robust software platform thatenables the development of commercial-grade applications.In almost one year of deployment in the fields, JADE neverstalled the NNEM system.6.2. Distinguishing featuresThanks to its agent-based nature, JADE is particularlysuited for applications that:1. require the execution of possibly long and fairly complextasks that can be triggered at any point in time and notjust in response to user inputs;2. involve several interactions between internal components,and especially one-to-many and many-to-manyinteractions;3. require components to dynamically appear anddisappear in the system and find each other atruntime.These are certainly important criteria that should betaken into account when deciding whether or not tochoose JADE as the basis for the development of a softwareapplication. Instead, when dealing with systems thatmainly retrieve/store data from/to a data repository followinguser requests/inputs (as for instance all classicalWeb applications), usage of state of the art middlewaretechnologies such as JEE application servers is certainlymore indicated.6.3. Component isolationThe agent oriented approach intrinsically facilitates theisolation of functional modules (i.e. agents) that can beimplemented separately thus leading to clean design andeasier organization of development teams.6.4. DistributionBeing natively designed with distribution in mind,JADE allows seamlessly spreading components (i.e.agents) across different hosts thus guaranteeing a highdegree of scalability. As the NNEM experience highlighted,however, distributed applications are more complexto run and manage. A further level of support istherefore required to hide as much as possible the complexityof the distribution to administrators. For this reason,an additional Platform Configuration and Controlmodule was developed to support configuration, activation,monitoring and problem investigation from a singleadministration console. Though implemented within thescope of the NNEM project, this module was designedto be generic and domain independent to facilitate itsfuture distribution in Open Source.7. ConclusionsThe paper presented JADE – a software framework tofacilitate the development of agent applications – anddescribed its software architecture and its provided functionalitiesas well as its integration with some technologies,in particular Web Service and reasoning tools and architectures.The paper discussed, looking back, possible reasonsfor the spread of JADE, in particular those non-technicalaspects which might represent lessons learned of generalusefulness also to other future projects.JADE is a mature software development tool, a lot ofpeople are working on its continuous maintenance,improvement and extension, and several commercial andindustrial applications built on top of JADE exist in differentapplication domains. The paper gave an overview ofthe Network Neutral Element Manager, a mission-criticalsystem developed and deployed by Telecom Italia todecouple OSS systems from the network. Today NNEMmanages about 10,000 devices, with the introduction ofthe new generation network it will have to deal with about100,000 devices and even more (one per building).The latest version of JADE is 3.5 and was released onJune 2007. Future work is focusing on a platform configurationand control module, as mentioned in Section 6 of thepaper, as well as on the development of a workflow-baseddistributed processing engine. This new engine will enableagents to execute application logics described via workflows,and to dynamically delegate to other agents piecesof workflows (i.e. sub-flows) according to criteria that areevaluated at runtime. Such criteria can be based forinstance on the current agent workload (similar to a GRIDcomputing environment) or to specific characteristics of thedelegated agents. This processing engine, together with anintegrated Service Creation Environment that supportsthe definition of processes in a user friendly graphical form,will form the core added value of the new version of JADEwhich is planned to be released at the beginning of 2008.The reader might argue: if JADE is such a great platform,why haven’t it made agent-oriented programming astandard technique within industry? JADE is a middlewarethat enables fast and reliable implementation of multiagentdistributed systems and which can be integrated withArtificial Intelligence (AI) tools; however, the conviction ofthe benefits of AI and agents is more consolidated in thescientific community than in the industrial one. The reasonsfor that are outside the scope of this paper and havebeen plentifully treated in several other fora. While notyet a mainstream approach in software engineering atlarge, JADE can arguably be considered the most popularsoftware agent platform available today.References[1] F. Bellifemine, G. Caire, D. Greenwood, Developing multi-agentsystems with JADE, Wiley Series in Agent Technology. ISBN 978-0-470-05747-6, February 2007.