A Bio-Inspired Agent Framework for Hardware Accelerated Distributed Pervasive Applications

Abstract

International audienceThis paper describes an agent oriented framework supporting bio-inspired mechanisms which takes profit of the intrinsic hardware parallelism of the pervasive platform developed within the Perplexus IST European project. The proposed framework is a flexible and modular means to describe and simulate complex phenomena such as biologically plausible neural networks or culture dissemination. Associated to this framework and based on the multiprocessor architecture of the Perplexus platform nodes, a tool suite capable of accelerating parallelizable agents is described. Therefore, this contribution combines the software flexibility of agent-based programming with the efficiency of multiprocessor hardware execution. This framework has been successfully tested with two experiments: a proof of concept application made of robots that autonomously improve their behaviours according to their environment and a spiking neural network simulation. These results prove that the framework and its associated methodology are relevant in the context of the simulation of complex phenomena

Towards Autonomous Scalable Integrated Systems

“…This section focuses on two fundamental aspects of the proposed BAF: on one hand a description of the BAF and overview of the provided functionality, on the other a description of POE specific agents. Further information on BAF can be found in [47]. As bio-inspiration and the three fundamentals of life are at the core of the project, the proposed framework extends JADE default agents by defining agents whose purpose is related to both interfacing and bio-inspired (POE) mechanism support as well as pervasive computing platform management agents.…”

JubiTool: Unified design flow for the Perplexus SIMD hardware accelerator

“…The software layer of the Perplexus Project we introduced in [4], [5] and [6] is based on the well known Java Agent DEvelopment framework JADE [7]. As a direct consequence of this, all users applications are programmed in Java [8] and described according to the agent concept.…”

Functional Connectivity Driven by External Stimuli in a Network of Hierarchically Organized Neural Modules

“…The characteristics of the implementation naturally geared the modeling framework towards agent oriented programming. An evaluation of the available platforms of this kind led us to select JADE [10] for the development and runtime execution of peer-to-peer applications which are based on the agent oriented paradigm [11]. It is a JAVA-based multi-agent development system that fulfils the FIPA specifications [12].…”