Tools, Frameworks, Languages, Standards and Methodologies

For wider use of agent technology in design and manufacturing, powerful agent development tools and supporting standards and methodologies are much needed. This chapter introduces the more widely known of these tools, frameworks, languages, standards, and methodologies, giving for each: its name; company, institution or research group name. It examines more well-known agent development tools and frameworks in alphabetic order, in two categories: commercial products and academic and research projects. Wide use of agent technology in industry depends on the availability of development tools and platforms that save developers having to implement the same basic functionality for each system. Analysis and design methodologies for multi-agent systems are quite rare in the literature. R. Levy et al. identify the primary infrastructure services required by agent-based applications, and evaluate current operating systems, programming languages and development tools to determine their suitability for implementing agent-based applications.