In a landmark development, NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT), has announced the beta release of the next generation multi agent system as public domain software.
"SAGE" (Scalable fault Tolerant Agent Grooming Environment), a software agent development environment, being a cutting edge technology is far richer than the object oriented software development approach currently in use.
Dr Arshad Ali, Director General NUST, said SAGE is the result of over one and a half years of hard work by the professionals from Comtec, Sendai, Japan and a team of researchers and young students from NIIT, Rawalpindi. As multi-agent system is an emerging area of interest in the field of computer science, it holds exciting opportunities for research and development.
The young researchers of NIIT, have availed this opportunity by developing a scalable and fault tolerant FIPA complaint multi-agent system.
The Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was formed in 1996 in Switzerland to produce software standards and specifications for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems.
Dr Hiroki Suguri, Vice president and Chief Technology officer of Comtec, explained the cutting-edge features of SAGE. 'SAGE' is the most advanced implementation of FIPA specifications.
Existing first-generation FIPA agent platforms, including Comtec platform, lacked important functionalities such as scalability, fault tolerance and flexibility.
SAGE on the other hand, is a second-generation platform.