ZEUS: IRS Agent Research

The ISR Agent Research project is concerned with the development and analysis of sophisticated AI problem-solving and control architectures for both single-agent and multiple-agent systems. Current research themes include multi-agent coordination and negotiation protocols, cooperative and non-cooperative multi-agent systems, organizational self-design, multi-agent adaptation of coordination strategies, computational economics as well as a multi-agent building platform.

The ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit is an award winning integrated environment for the rapid ievelopment of multi-agent applications. ZEUS is entirely implemented in Java 2 and hence will run on most major platforms.

The construction of multi-agent systems involves long development times and requires solutions to some considerable technical difficulties. This has motivated the development of the ZEUS toolkit, which provides a library of software components and tools that facilitate the rapid design, development and deployment of agent systems. The ZEUS framework is composed of several building blocks.

• The Agent Component Library whose components implement the different aspects of agent functionality
• The Agent Building Tools which provide an integrated development environment through which the agents are specified and generated
• The Visualisation Tools the runtime environment that enables applications to be observed and, where necessary, debugged