WADE: a software platform to develop mission critical applications exploiting agents and workflows

In this paper, we describe two mission critical applications currently deployed by Telecom Italia in the Operations Support System domains. The first one called "Network Neutral Element Manager" implements a mediation layer between network elements and OSS systems. The second one, known as "Wizard", provides step-by-step guidance to technicians performing maintenance operations in the fields. Both applications have strong requirements in terms of scalability and flexibility and exploit the combination of agents and workflows to meet them. As such both of them are based on a common software platform called WADE (Workflows and Agents Development Environment). WADE is the main evolution of JADE a popular Open Source framework that facilitates the development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems. WADE adds to JADE the support for the execution of tasks defined according to the workflow metaphor and a number of mechanisms that help managing the complexity of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Giovanni Caire, Danilo Gotta, Massimo Banzi
• Keywords: ATAL 2008, Intelligent Agents, Open Source, Platform Called Wade, Workflow