since 2002-02-19
The notion of heterogeneous autonomous agents collaborating to solve problems is a powerful metaphor for the engineering of distributed and interoperable software systems. This agent-based approach introduces a new level of abstraction ¾ of knowledge level co-operation between autonomous systems ¾ that enhances distributed systems interoperability, scalability and re-configurability. However, thus far, the promise of the agent approach has been largely unrealised in the distributed software engineering community. This is due to a number of factors (including the current lack of standards for agent technology), but primarily because of the inherent complexity of constructing collaborative agent systems.
To facilitate large-scale realisation of the collaborative agent approach to distributed software engineering we felt frameworks, methodologies and toolkits were needed that would support the rapid development of multi-agent systems. This has led to the development of ZEUS, a toolkit for constructing collaborative multi-agent applications. ZEUS is a culmination of a careful synthesis of established agent technologies to provide an integrated environment for the rapid development of multi-agent systems. ZEUS defines a multi-agent system design approach and supports it with a visual environment for capturing user specification of agents that are used to generate Java source code of the agents.
from The ZEUS Technical Manual
A Introduce of Zeus by Xiwang Ge (HFUT undergraduate thesis, 2000,
in Chinese)
An example: How to link agent with extra resources
A Runtime interface of Zeus
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