Design of Agent-Based Systems

(TIES433), 5-10 ECTS

Instructors:  Vagan Terziyan and Michal Nagy

Email: vagan.terziyan@jyu.fi, minagy@jyu.fi

Course in Korppi

Attention: 1-st Lecture: Monday, 12 September 2011, Time: 10:15 – 11:55, Place: Ag Alfa (B122.1)

Overview:

The course focuses on the use of Distributed Artificial Intelligence methods, and more specifically of Intelligent Agents Technologies, for development of complex distributed software systems.

The course consists of two parts: theory-oriented (Vagan Terziyan) and practice-oriented (Michal Nagy). The theory-oriented part of the course reviews appropriate AI methods and technologies. It provides knowledge about autonomous intelligent agents, agent technologies, mobility of agents, agent platforms, multi-agent systems, agent communication, agent coordination, agent negotiation, agent intelligence, agent-based industrial applications and systems. The practice-oriented part of the course focuses on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems as a novel software development paradigm (also known as agent-oriented software engineering), one especially suited for distributed systems. It discusses the novelty and benefits of AOSE as compared e.g. to OOSE and provides knowledge and some practical skills related to design of multi-agent systems using middleware frameworks such as JADE and UBIWARE. The latter is own development of the course teachers and their group.

The course is lectured in English.

The ECTS allocation scheme:

• The minimum: Theoretical part of the course and its assignment  - 5 ECTS credits.
• Participation in Demos - up to 1 additional ECTS credit
• Delivery of Demo results - up to 1 additional ECTS credit.
• Doing the Final assignment - up to 2 additional ECTS credits.
• Writing a short report with comments and suggestions about UBIWARE platform and S-APL - up to 1 additional ECTS credit.

Thus the minimum is 5 ECTS and the maximum is 10 ECTS credits.

Lecture Notes and online material:

Part I Lectures (Vagan Terziyan):

Lecture 1: Course Introduction (includes also lessons schedule)

Lecture 2: Overview of Intelligent Agents

Lectures 3 - 4: Overview of (Multi)Agent Technologies

Lectures 5 - 6: Industrial Applications of Agent Technology

Part I Assignment (Vagan Terziyan) (slides 48-56 contain task for the assignment)

Part II Lectures (Michal Nagy) (find online material and latest updates in: http://users.jyu.fi/~minagy/ties433/ ):

Lecture 7: Agents as a novel Software Engineering paradigm

Lecture 8: Agent Platforms

Lecture 9: Agent Standards

Lecture 10 - 11: UBIWARE Platform and Semantic Agent Programming Language 

Part II demos (Michal Nagy) (find online material and latest updates in: http://users.jyu.fi/~minagy/ties433/ ):

Demo 1

Demo 2

Demo 3

Demo 4

Part II final exercise/assignment (Michal Nagy) (find requirements, online material and latest updates in: http://users.jyu.fi/~minagy/ties433/ )