The JIAC V Toolipse provides an integrated development environment for JIAC V services and applications. The Toolipse is a collection of tools that ease the work with JIAC V. It also integrates seamlessly into the accustomed working environment of a Java developer.
With the help of the JIAC V Toolipse you create and manage JIAC V projects.
The Toolipse consists of three components:
- The JIAC Integrated Development Tools (JIDT), some lightweight plugins for Eclipse for simplified creation of JIAC V projects, dependency management, as well as a few tutorials and general help
- The JIAC V Integration, running a JIAC V node within the Toolipse itself for direct interaction with other running JIAC nodes, as well as ontology management using the Semantic Service Manager (SSM)
- The Visual Service Design Tool (VSDT) for creating BPMN processes and deriving JIAC V agent behavior from those. The VSDT can be used independently of JIAC, too.
Requirements
- Java 1.8+
- Eclipse + GMF + XText + ATL + M2E
- We recommend using Eclipse Oxygen (4.7); compatibility with older (or newer) versions of Eclipse can not be guaranteed, but it still seems to work as it should with Eclipse 4.18 / 2020-12
Installation
- In Eclipse, go to Help > Install New Software…
- Add the Toolipse Update Site: Name: Toolipse; Location: http://www.jiac.de/Downloads/toolipse/site/updatesite
- Or download the latest Update Site (see link below) and add that as an Archived Site
- Select the wanted components, click on Next >, accept the license and click on Finish
- Note: If you do not see any features, de-select the option to Group items by category
Downloads
- JIAC Toolipse Archived Update Site: [ZIP]
JIAC Integrated Development Tools
The JIAC Integrated Development Tools (JIDT) provide some Eclipse plugins for easily creating new JIAC projects. Among others, it can support the user in dependency management and in building and launching the projects. It also provides a uniform structure for new JIAC V projects.
Main Features:
- A Dashboard and some Cheat Sheets for getting started with JIAC
- A Wizard for creating new JIAC Projects, automatically creating an accordant pom.xml file and triggering Maven for the initial project setup; also comes with a simple dependency management for including existing JIAC libraries.
- A JIAC Perspective, grouping the most relevant views as well as an extension to the Project Navigator view, showing the different Agents, Beans, Actions etc. defined in the current project.
JIAC Integration and Ontology Management
This feature contains an entire JIAC platform, running within the Eclipse IDE itself. It is used by several other plugins for interaction with other running JIAC nodes. It also includes the Semantic Service Manager (SSM) which can be used for creating and managing OWL-S service descriptions.
Semantic Service Manager (SSM)
- Create and manage OWL-S files
- Search for existing OWL-S files on any reachable JIAC file server agent
- Import semantic services into VSDT processes
- Semantic service planning (experimental)
Other Features
- Inspect currently running JIAC agents and invoke their actions (only with primitive parameters) — great for testing
- A simple JIAC-based chat client within Eclipse, to show your colleagues what you are working on
Visual Service Design Tool
The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) provides an abstract, easily understandable and platform independent view on a process or a program. However, most BPMN tools are focused only on one aspect of BPMN, namely the mapping to BPEL. Thus, while process modelling and BPMN should be independent of a specific executable language, the tools are not. To address this shortcoming, a pure BPMN editor is needed, that is dynamically extensible with added editing functionality and export features to executable languages.The VSDT is a well-equipped BPMN editor that is independent of any specific target language. Thus, while the usual transformation to BPEL, as well as other transformations, is included, the VSDT can easily be extended with additional export functionality targeting other languages. For that purpose, the individual transformations are subdivided into several stages, so that large parts can be reused throughout different mappings, for instance the challenging transformation of the control flow. Further, a simple expression language can be used at modelling time, so that even the expressions can be translated to match the target language.
Editor Features:
- BPMN editor with rich modelling support
- pattern-based process design
- import of existing (Web) services
- process structure view
- simulation and interpretation
Transformation Features:
- natural language text generation
- easily extensible transformation framework
- validation and translation of expressions
- transformation to BPEL and JIAC
- import and export for STP-BPMN
Resources:
Publications
Tobias Küster, Axel Heßler, Sahin Albayrak: Process-Oriented Modelling, Creation, and Interpretation of Multi-Agent Systems In: Int. J. Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Vol. 5, Nr. 2/3, pp. 108-133; 2016
Tobias Küster, Marco Lützenberger: An Overview of a Mapping from BPMN to Agents (Extended Abstract) In: Rafael H. Bordini, Edith Elkind, Gerhard Weiß, and Pinar Yolum (eds.) Proceedings of the 14th International Conferences on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2015), Istanbul, Turkey. pp. 1783-1784. IFAAMAS; 2015
Tobias Küster, Marco Lützenberger, Sahin Albayrak: A Formal Description of a Mapping from Business Processes to Agents In: Matteo Baldoni and Luciano Baresi and Mehdi Dastani (eds.) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems, Third International Workshop, EMAS 2015, Istanbul, Turkey, May 5, 2015, Revised, Selected, and Invited Papers. pp. 153-170. Springer International Publishing; 2015
Tobias Küster, Axel Heßler, Sahin Albayrak: Towards Process-Oriented Modelling and Creation of Multi-Agent Systems In: Dalpiaz, F.; Dix, J. & van Riemsdijk, M. B. (Eds.) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems — Second International Workshop, EMAS 2014, Paris, France, May 5-6, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Springer International Publishing, 2014, 8758, 163-180
Tobias Küster, Marco Lützenberger, Axel Heßler, and Benjamin Hirsch: Integrating Process Modelling into Multi-Agent System Engineering. In: Multiagent and Grid Systems – An International Journal, 8(1):105-124, January 2012; 2012
Tobias Küster, Marco Lützenberger, Axel Heßler and Benjamin Hirsch: Integrating Process Modelling into Multi-Agent System Engineering. In: M. Huhns, R. Kowalczyk, Z. Maamar, R. Unland and B. Vo: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop of Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering (SOCASE), 2010.
Tobias Küster, Axel Heßler: Towards Transformations from BPMN to Heterogeneous Systems. In: Ardagna, D., Mecella, M. and Yang, J. (Eds.) : Business Process Management Workshops — BPM 2008 International Workshops, Milano, Italy, September 1-4, 2008. Revised Papers, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009, 17, 200-211
Tobias Küster: Development of a Visual Service Design Tool Providing a Mapping from BPMN to JIAC. Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität Berlin, April 2007. [PDF]
Michael Burkhardt, Marco Lützenberger und Nils Masuch: Towards Toolipse 2. Tool Support for the Next Generation Agent Framework. Computing and Information Systems Journal, 2009, 13, 21-28
Christian Kuster, Tobias Küster, Marco Lützenberger, Sahin Albayrak: Model-driven Development and Validation of Multi-agent Systems in JIAC V with the Agent World Editor In: Procedia Computer Science, Volume 32, 2014. [PDF]
Marco Lützenberger, Tobias Küster, Axel Heßler und Benjamin Hirsch: Unifying JIAC Agent Development with AWE. In: MATES 2009 Conference Proceedings, 2009. [PDF]
Marco Lützenberger: Development of a Visual Notation and Editor for Unifying the Application Engineering within the JIAC Framework Family. Technische Universität Berlin, 2009