Developing A Multi-Agent System in JADE for Information Management in Educational Competence Domains

Significant researches concerning multi-agent systems for information management have been conducted in recent years. Interest in multi-agent systems is rising because there are a lot of benefits that can be associated with their usage. Development of multi-agent system architectures, that facilitate information management, is an important research challenge that faces advancement in the management information systems area in the form of message passing technologies. The challenges associated with information management can be classified into three general categories: acquisition, organization and distribution. A management information system includes a series of processes that an individual (software agent) has to accomplish. Considering these processes, analysis of the information management has led to identification of several sets of such processes. By analyzing the previous research conducted in this area, it is determined that so far there haven't been many studies about information management development approaches based on multi-agent systems platform. The paper presents a multi-agent system that is designed to support the management of information about graduates of one or more educational institutes such as high school, university, masters and doctoral degree. We developed and implemented a multi-agent system for information management using the JADE platform. If the data is located in distributed execution environments, then the idea of using mobile agents allows the improvement of the system's performance. The multi-agents system presented in the paper is a distributed information management system based on the use of mobile agents, who receive queries from the system user and who, visiting the educational institutes databases, where this information can be found, transmit the interrogation results and then, a master agent processes these results based on rule sets implemented in the JADE platform. The mobility of the agent is defined by using an approach based on both the quality attributes specified for the multi-agent architecture and on the execution environments of the multi-agent system. This paper presents a distributed management model based on mobile agents in JADE. The model includes a distributed multi-agent system that is responsible for its management. Solving an information management problem requires a lot of tasks. The paper presents the results of a simulation of the multi-agent system operating on behalf of a user, management tasks and management information for some persons. Particularly, this work is focused on describing the designed multi-agent system architecture in JADE. This multi-agent system can be used by an employer for an interview in order to find if a potential candidate has competence in your job description (domain of competence). (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.