Announce: an erlang platform for agent programming

[Corrado Santoro]

Dear Erlang gurus,

I would like to announce a new platform for programming Software Agents
with Erlang.

The platform is called "eXAT" (erlang eXperimental Agent Platform) and
provides an "all-in-one framework" allowing to design, with a single
tool, agent intelligence, agent behaviour and agent communication.

eXAT integrates an Erlang-based expert system engine with an execution
environment for agent behaviours, based on object-oriented finite-state
machines, and a module able to handle agent messaging.

All information can be found on the eXAT Web page:

http://www.diit.unict.it/users/csanto/exat/index.html

There you may find some papers and the eXAT reference manual. There, you
may also download the platform.

eXAT was presented, for the first time, at the italian "Workshop on
Objects and Agents (WOA 2003)", held last year in Sardinia
(see http://www.diee.unica.it/woa03/), and it gained a discrete interest
from people traditionally working with Java-based tools.

An improvement of eXAT was then presented at the international IEEE
"Workshop on Agent-based Computing for Enterprise Collaboration (ACEC
2004)", held at WETICE 2004 in Modena
(see http://siplab.csee.wvu.edu/wetice04/). In this occasion, eXAT
gained a so high interest that the paper received the "Best Paper
Award".

Currently, only a beta version of the platform can be downloaded from
the web site. The first release is scheduled for the end of September
2004, when the eXAT platform will be "officially" presented at the Agent
Exhibition that will be held in Erfurt (Germany) at NetObjectDays 2004
(http://dawis.informatik.uni-essen.de/agents/cfp/).

Further messages will be sent to this mailing list when any news on eXAT
will be available.

In any case, I would appreciate any comment on the functionalities of
the platform, the design choices made or anything you think could
improve eXAT.

All the best,
-Corrado


-- 
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Eng. Corrado Santoro, Ph.D.

University of Catania - Engineering Faculty
Department of Computer Science and
Telecommunications Engineering
Viale A. Doria, 6 - 95125 CATANIA (ITALY)

Tel: +39 095 7382380           Fax: +39 095 7382397
     +39 095 7382365
     +39 095 7382364

EMail: csanto@REDACTED
Personal Home Page:
            http://www.diit.unict.it/users/csanto

NUXI Home Page:
            http://nuxi.iit.unict.it
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