Skip to main content
Log in

A performance evaluation of three multiagent platforms

  • Published:
Artificial Intelligence Review Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In the last few years, many researchers have focused on testing the performance of Multiagent Platforms. Results obtained show a lack of performance and scalability on current Multiagent Platforms, but the existing research does not tackle poor efficiency causes. This article is aimed not only at testing the performance of Multiagent Platforms but also the discovery of Multiagent Platform design decisions that can lead to these deficiencies. Therefore, we are able to understand to what extent the internal design of a Multiagent Platform affects its performance. The experiments performed are focused on the features involved in agent communication.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Ahmad HF, Suguri H, Ali A, Malik S, Mugal M, Shafiq MO, Tariq A, Basharat A (2005) Scalable fault tolerant agent grooming environment: Sage. In: AAMAS ’05: proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, ACM Press, New York, pp 125–126, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1082473.1082816

  • AOS Group (2008) An agent infrastructure for providing the decision-making capability required for autonomous systems. http://www.agent-software.com

  • Argente E, Julian V, Botti V (2005) From human to agent organizations. In: CoOrg-05: proceedings of the first international workshop on coordination and organisation, pp 1–11

  • Bellavista P, Corradi A, Stefanelli C (1999) A secure and open mobile agent programming environment. Autonomous decentralized systems, international symposium on 0:238, http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ISADS.1999.838439

  • Bellifemine F, Caire G, Poggi A, Rimassa G (2003) Jade a white paper. Telecom Italia EXP Mag 3(3): 6–19

    Google Scholar 

  • Bellifemine F, Caire G, Poggi A, Rimassa G (2008) Jade: a software framework for developing multi-agent applications. Lessons learned. Inform Softw Technol 50(1–2): 10–21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bigus JP, Schlosnagle DA, Pilgrimand JR, Mills WN III, Diao Y (2002) Able: a toolkit for building multiagent autonomic systems. IBM Syst 41:350–371

    Google Scholar 

  • Bitting E, Carter J, Ghorbani A (2003) Multiagent system development kit: an evaluation. In: Proceedings of communication networks and services research conference, May 15–16, Moncton, pp 80–92

  • Bordini RH, Wooldridge M, Hübner JF (2007) Programming multi-agent systems in AgentSpeak using Jason (Wiley Series in Agent Technology). Wiley, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Brazier F, Mobach D, Overeinder B, van Splunter S, van Steen M, Wijngaards N (2002) Agentscape: middleware, resource management, and services. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international SANE conference, pp 403–404

  • Bäumer C, Breugst M, Choy S, Magedanz T (1999) Grasshopper—a universal agent platform based on OMG MASIF and FIPA standards. In: Karmouch A, Impey R (eds) Mobile agents for telecommunication applications, proceedings of the first international workshop (MATA 1999), October 1999, World Scientific Pub, Ottawa, pp 1–18

  • Burbeck K, Garpe D, Nadjm-Tehrani S (2004) Scale-up and performance studies of three agent platforms. In: IPCCC 2004

  • Camacho D, Aler R, Castro C, Molina JM (2002) Performance evaluation of zeus, jade, and skeletonagent frameworks. In: Systems, man and cybernetics, 2002 IEEE international conference on

  • Chmiel K, Tomiak D, Gawinecki M, Karczmarek P (2004) Testing the efficency of jade agent platform. In: Proceedings of the ISPDC/HeteroPar’04, 49–56

  • Collis JC, Ndumu DT, Nwana HS, Lee LC (1998) The zeus agent building tool-kit. BT Technol J 16(3): 60–68

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Contreras M, Germán E, Chi M, Sheremetov L (2004) Design and implementation of a fipa compliant agent platform in.net. J Object Technol 3(9): 5–28

    Google Scholar 

  • Cortese E, Quarta F, Vitaglione G (2003) Scalability and performance of jade message transport system. EXP 3: 52–65

    Google Scholar 

  • Cost RS, Finin T, Labrou Y, Luan X, Peng Y, Soboroff I, Mayfield J, Boughanam A (1998) Jackal: A Java-based Tool for Agent Development. In: AAAI-98, workshop on tools for agent development, Madison, WI

  • Dale J (2002) April agent platform reference manual. Fujitsu Laboratories of America

  • Duvigneau M, Moldt D, Rölke H (2003) Concurrent Architecture for a multi-agent Platform. In: Giunchiglia F, Odell J, Weiß G (eds) Agent-oriented software engineering III, vol 2585. Third international workshop, agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) 2002, Bologna, Italy, July 2002. Revised Papers and Invited Contributions, Springer, Berlin, LNCS

  • Escriva M, Palanca J, Aranda G, Garca-Fornes A, Julian V, Botti V (2006) A jabber-based multi-agent system platform. In: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS06), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., ACM Press, New York, pp 1282–1284

  • FIPA (2000) The foundation for intelligent physical agents. http://www.fipa.org

  • Giang NT, Tung DT (2002) Agent platform evaluation and comparison

  • Graham JR, Decker K, Mersic M (2003) Decaf—a flexible multi agent system architecture. Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 7(1–2): 7–27

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gray RS (1995) Agent Tcl: a transportable agent system. In: Proceedings of the CIKM workshop on intelligent information agents, fourth international conference on information and knowledge management (CIKM 95), Baltimore

  • Gutknecht O, Ferber J (2000) The madkit agent platform architecture. Lect Notes Comput Sci 1887: 48–55

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Helsinger A, Thome M, Wright T (2004) Cougaar: a scalable, distributed multi-agent architecture. In: SMC(2), IEEE, pp 1910–1917

  • Inc IA (2004) User guide. http://www.opencybele.org/docs/UsersGuideCybeleProVersion1.0.pdf

  • Ita ME (1997) Concordia: an infrastructure for collaborating mobile agents

  • Jarvinen J (2002) Agentdock platform bdi-agents. http://www.cs.uta.fi/kurssit/AgO/ago7a-print.pdf

  • Kusek M, Voncina D, Vyroubal V (2004) Design and implementation of the mobile agent platform crossbow. In: Proceedings of the conference CTI—telecommunications & information, pp 82–87

  • Lee LC, Ndumu DT, Wilde PD (1998) The stability, scalability and performance of multi-agent systems. BT Technol J 16: 94–103

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luck M, McBurney P, Shehory O, Willmott S (2005) Agent technology: computing as interaction (A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing). AgentLink

  • Lugmayr W (1999) Gypsy: a component-oriented mobile agent system. URL:citeseer.ist.psu.edu/lugmayr99gypsy.html

  • Meyer AP (2004) A multi-agent systems engineering environment for the semantic web

  • Minar N, Gray M, Roup O, Krikorian R, Maes P (1999) Hive: distributed agents for networking things. In: Proceedings of ASA/MA’99, the first international symposium on agent systems and applications and third international symposium on mobile agents

  • Mulet L, Such JM, Alberola JM (2006) Performance evaluation of open-source multiagent platforms. In: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS06), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., ACM Press, New York, pp 1107–1109

  • Nwana H (1994) Negotiation strategies: an overview. Internal report 14, BT laboratories

  • Omicini A, Rimassa G (2004) Towards seamless agent middleware. In: TAPOC 2004

  • Peine H, Stolpmann T (1997) The architecture of the ara platform for mobile agents. In: First international workshop on mobile agents (MA 97)

  • Ricordel PM, Demazeau Y (2000) From analysis to deployment: a multi-agent platform survey. In: ESAW’00, engineering societies in the agents’ world

  • Riekki J, Huhtinen J, Ala-Siuru P, Alahuhta P, Kaartinen J, Roning J (2003) Genie of the net, an agent platform for managing services on behalf of the user. Comput Commun 26(11): 1188–1198 (ubiquitous Computing)

    Google Scholar 

  • Roth V, Jalali-Sohi M (2001) Concepts and architecture of a security-centric mobile agent server. In: ISADS

  • Shakshuki E (2005) A methodology for evaluating agent toolkits. In: ITCC ’05: proceedings of the international conference on information technology: coding and computing (ITCC’05)—volume I, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, pp 391–396, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ITCC.2005.15

  • Shi Z, Zhang H, Cheng Y, Jiang Y, Sheng Q, Zhao Z (2004) Mage: an agent-oriented programming environment. In: ICCI ’04: proceedings of the third IEEE international conference on cognitive informatics, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, pp 250–257, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICCI.2004.20

  • Silva L, Soares G, Martins P, Batista V, Santos L (2000) Comparing the performance of mobile agent systems: a study of benchmarking. Comput Commun 23: 769–778

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Software R (2007) Voyager messaging developer’s guide. http://www.recursionsw.com/

  • Ten Hoeve EC (2003) 3APL Platform. Master’s thesis, Utrech University

  • Tripathi AR, Karnik NM, Ahmed T, Singh RD, Prakash A, Kakani V, Vora MK, Pathak M (2002) Design of the ajanta system for mobile agent programming. J Syst Softw 62: 123–140

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Venners B (1997) The architecture of aglets. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-1997/jw-04-hood.html

  • Vrba P (2003) Java-based agent platform evaluation. In: Proceedings of the HoloMAS 2003, pp 47–58

  • Wooldridge M (2002) An introduction to multiagent systems. Wiley, England

    Google Scholar 

  • Wooldridge M, Jennings NR (1995) Intelligent agents: theory and practice. Knowl Eng Rev 10(2): 115–152

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu H, Shatz SM (2003) Adk: an agent development kit based on a formal design model for multi-agent systems. J Autom Softw Eng 10: 337–365

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Juan M. Alberola.

Additional information

This work has been partially supported by CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under grant CSD2007-00022, and projects TIN2008-04446 and PROMETEO/2008/051. Juan M. Alberola has received a grant of Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España (AP2007-00289). Jose M. Such has received a grant of Conselleria d’Empresa, Universitat i Ciència de la Generalitat Valenciana (BFPI06/096).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Alberola, J.M., Such, J.M., Garcia-Fornes, A. et al. A performance evaluation of three multiagent platforms. Artif Intell Rev 34, 145–176 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-010-9167-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-010-9167-9

Keywords

Navigation