Application of Java Serialization into JADE Agent Communication

Abstract

Open systems consist of autonomous and heterogeneous agents who interact in order to exchange or negotiate information, knowledge, and services. The principal challenge in agent communication research is to enable flexible and efficient communication among agents. Jade follows FIPA standards so that ideally Jade agents could interact with agents written in other languages and running on other platforms. From the view of message content, there are three ways to implement communication between agents. This paper mainly did some research on how to implement communication between Jade agents using serialized Java objects. Serialization is Java's built-in mechanism for transforming an object graph into a series of bytes, which can then be sent over the network or stored in a file. The research relies on the Project Supported by Innovative Research Team in University of LiaoNing Province: Maritime search and rescue decision support system based on multi-agent. The results show that in a distributed network programming, particularly for transmitting complex objects in multi-agent systems, the use of object serialization is very flexible. But it is also very limited. It must store and retrieve the entire object graph at once, making it unsuitable for dealing with large amounts of data.