ZEUS: An Advanced Tool-Kit for Engineering Distributed Multi-Agent Systems

There is an emerging consensus on the need to develop methodologies and tool-kits for building distributed multi-agent systems. This paper presents ZEUS, an advanced development tool-kit for constructing collaborative agent applications. ZEUS is a culmination of a careful synthesis of established agent technologies with the addition of some new ones, to provide an integrated environment for the rapid software engineering of collaborative agent applications. ZEUS defines a multi-agent system design methodology, supports the methodology with an environment for capturing user specification of agents, and automatically generates the executable source code of the user-defined agents. We also report on preliminary informal evaluation of ZEUS on three domains. Keywords Agent architectures, distributed multi-agent systems, constructing collaborative agent applications. I. Introduction This paper describes ZEUS, an advanced tool-kit for building distributed multi-agent applications. The too..