# ARPS: A Framework for Development, Simulation, Evaluation, and Deployment of Multi-Agent Systems
## 2 Related Work  
There are multiple toolkits, platforms, and frameworks available for creating a MAS. In this section, we will describe a few of them. The works here by no means represent the only alternatives for creating MASs. For other options, refer to surveys on this topic, such as the one presented in [7]. The works reviewed here implement common aspects of a MAS to work in an actual environment, such as communication, interoperability, storage, security, and resource discovery. Therefore, the users can focus on the definition of the agents and their behaviour, how they are organized, and how they interact to solve a problem. Among the popular MAS frameworks, JADE (also known as Java Agent Development Framework) [8] was created to address the problem of interoperability and provide an environment for the development of agents. It has no domain dependent requirement as seen in the other solutions. According to the authors, such dependencies were obstacles for the adoption of MAS technologies at the time of its conception. JADE simplifies the implementation of multi-agent systems through a middleware compliant with the FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) specifications [9], a standard proposed for interoperability of agents. The JADE authors argue that is industry-driven and currently the most known FIPA-compliant agent platform in the academic and industrial community. The A-Globe platform [10] is designed for testing experimental scenarios featuring agents' position that requires a Geographical Information System (GIS, though agents may suffer from communication inaccessibility either because of the spatial distance of the agents or by broken links. Because it is a closed-environment, interoperability is not one of the concerns of this platform. Hence, it is not fully compliant with the FIPA-specifications on inter-platform communication, albeit it provides compliance with the Agent Communication Language (ACL), a structure for composing messages exchanged by agents. Based on the fulfillment of requirements such as robustness, security, and the ability to ensure that a partial solution can be executed when an optimized one is not found due to constraints, DARPA funded a project called Cougaar [11] (Cognitive Agent Architecture). This agent platform was created to offer specialized support for logistics-related problems. This platform is also not FIPA-compliant. It aims to facilitate the development of agent-based applications that are complex, large scale and distributed. Other solutions offer more components built on top of the existing agent-based platforms. The Jadex BDI Agent System [12] follows the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) model [13] and facilitates intelligent agent construction over other middleware such as JADE. It has been used to build applications in different domains, such as simulation, scheduling, and mobile computing. The programming model of Jadex allows for designing an application as hierarchical decomposition of components interacting via services and thus helps to make complexity manageable. These components can be used in concurrent and dynamic distributed systems. Another example is JaCaMo [14]. It is an interpreter for an extended version of AgentSpeak, a BDI agent-oriented logic programming language [15]. It is a platform that integrates three projects with different MAS-related paradigm models for development: Jason [16] for agent development; Moise [17] for agent organization; and CArtAgO [18] for environment-oriented programming. Lastly, the MadKit [19] offers a modular and scalable multiagent platform. Its central aspect is the ability to organize agents in groups and roles aiming at the development of artificial societies. It is closely related to our approach in the sense that has a simulator component. Nonetheless, the simulation and evaluation are not seamless in the workflow, leaving the responsibility of this integration to the user. Previous work has often presented MAS tools that provide a base infrastructure to implement agents.