Extending NetLogo with BDI and FIPA ACL Support

NetLogo is an excellent platform independent environment for modelling social and natural phenomena as multi-agent systems with a great number of agents. The NetLogo platform was developed by Uri Wilensky in 1999 and is under continuous development at the CCL.  

Although the platform offers support for reactive agent systems, modelling BDI agents and explicit symbolic message exchange is not supported. Thus, we have extended NetLogo with libraries to support both and used it for setting coursework in an Intelligent Agents unit. These extensions are shown below, together with some documentation:

Both libraries work with NetLogo versions 4.1 and 5. There will be an updated version of the libraries listed above soon, presenting new features.

• FIPA ACL extension (nls file to be included in code), FIPA Manual
• DBI Agents Extension, (nls file to be included in code), BDI Manual

Examples

Domestic Robot example, that is the famous example demonstrating the BDI architecture.

• The Domestic Robot

The Taxi scenario simulation, is a model practical coursework, that is described in the paper "MAS Coursework Design in NetLogo". The coursework includes as usual a reactive and a proactive model:

• For NetLogo 5
  • A reactive agents scenario that is rather simple to implement, and
  • a cooperative agents scenario that needs the libraries mentioned above for the implementation of cooperation between agents.
• For NetLogo 4.1 (old Code - Note: there are no major changes between the two apart from the NetLogo primitives that needed to be updated)
  • A reactive agents scenario that is rather simple to implement, and
  • a cooperative agents scenario that needs the libraries mentioned above.

CourseWork

Using the above libraries we have set a number of coursework assignments:

Code is in NetLogo 4, but will be imported to NetLogo 5, with no problems.

Name	Descriptions	Code made Available to Students
Rescue Agents	Practical #1 Description	P1 Code
	Practical #2 Description	P2 Code
Forest Fires	Practical #1 Description	P1 Code
	Practical #2 Description	P2 Code

** Solutions are available on request by the authors.

People Involved

• Ilias Sakellariou
• Petros Kefalas
• Ioanna Stamatopoulou

Relevant Publications

(In case you have used and want to refer to the work presented above)

1. Ilias Sakellariou, Petros Kefalas and Ioanna Stamatopoulou, " Enhancing NetLogo to Simulate BDI Commuicating Agents", in Proceedings of 5th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence, SETN 08, J. Darzentas et al. (Eds.), LNAI 5138, Springer-Verlag pp. 263–275, Syros Greece, October 2-4, 2008 (pdf) (Springer On-line Version) (© Springer-Verlag)
2. Ilias Sakellariou, Petros Kefalas and Ioanna Stamatopoulou, "Teaching Intelligent Agents using NetLogo", in Proceedings of the ACM-IFIP Informatics Education Europe III Conference, IEEIII 2008,  Venice, Italy, December 4-5, 2008 (pdf).
3. Ilias Sakellariou, Petros Kefalas and Ioanna Stamatopoulou, "MAS Coursework Design in NetLogo", in Proceedings of the Educational Uses of Multi Agent Systems (EduMAS 09), Workshop of the Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 09), May 12, Budapest, Hungary, 2009. (pdf) 

Other Links

• The NetLogo Platform.
• The excellent Jose Vidal's page with NetLogo Models.

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For further questions, comments, suggestions, bug reports etc. please contact: Ilias Sakellariou

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