A Multiagent Platform for Developments of Accounting Intelligent Applications

Abstract

Agent and multiagent technology has been the subject of many discussions within the scientific community, but it is maybe only recent that it has seen significant degree of exploitation in many types of application, including accounting application. The initial software developments, that later became the JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) platform, were started by Telecom Italia in 1998, motivated by the need to validate the FIPA specifications. JADE went open source in 2000. JADE has a website1 from where the software, documentation, example code, and a wealth of information about usages of JADE are available. The project welcomes the participation of the open source community with a variety of means to become involved and contribute to the project. In order to facilitate industrial involvement, in 2003 was defined a collaboration agreement and formed the JADE Governing Board, a not–for–profit organization of companies committed to contributing to the development and promotion of this platform. The Board was forms into contractual consortium with well–defined rules specifying the rights and obligations toward generated IPR. The Board is open with members able to join and leave according to their needs. When JADE was became public, it was used almost exclusively by the FIPA community but as its feature set grew far beyond the FIPA specifications, so did its use by a globally distributed developer community. It is important to note that this platform contributed to wide diffusion of the FIPA specifications by providing a set of tools and software abstractions that hid the specifications themselves; programmers could essentially implement according to the specifications without the need to study them