“Plug and test” - software agents in virtual environments

James, a Java based agent modeling environment for simulation has been developed to support the compositional construction of test beds for multi-agent systems and their execution in distributed environments. The modeling formalism of James imposes only few constraints on the modeling of agents and facilitates a “plug and test” with pieces of agent code which has been demonstrated in earlier work. However, even entire agents can be run in James as they are run in their run-time environment. The integration of agents as a whole is based on model templates which serve as the agents´ interface and representative during the simulation run. The effort which is put into defining model templates for selected agent systems obviates the need for the single agent programmer to get acquainted with the underlying modeling and simulation formalism. Instead, the agent programmer can compose the experimental frame and test the programmed agents as they are. The approach is illustrated with agents of the mobile agent system, Mole