Elastic JADE: Dynamically Scalable Multi Agents Using Cloud Resources

Multi-agent systems have been applied to integrate heterogeneous information, to work on the behalf of users and to provide decision support in challenging environments. As this technology continues to develop, the numbers of agents that comprise a system and their usage of computing resources are both likely to grow. Distributed agent platforms such as JADE (Java Agent Development framework) provide a partial solution to such scalability issues. The emergence of infrastructure as a service (IAAS) cloud computing environments which allow the dynamic scaling of resources provides us with new ways of harnessing the distributed nature of multi-agent systems and their development environments. In this paper we introduce Elastic-JADE, the aim of which is to allow a local JADE platform to automatically scale up and down using Amazon EC2 resources when the local platform is heavily loaded. This paper describes the system architecture, a prototype and comments on future directions that this work may take.