A comparison of the basic principles and behavioural aspects of Akka, Jacamo and Jade development frameworks

Akka, JaCaMo, and Jade are three Java-based frameworks for agent/actor system programming. They present substantial differences both in the reference models and the behavioural aspects of the main entities (actors vs agents). The objective of this work is to compare the basic principles and behavioural aspects of these three frameworks, also giving an overview of other comparison categories in which we briefly discuss other criteria like reasoning and knowledge, interaction/communication model, sociality. In each sub-category, the characteristics of the three frameworks will be analysed, and finally, the relative differences will be discussed. The analysis highlights a substantial difference between Akka actor-based system and agent-based ones, such as JaCaMo and Jade. The results of the analysis reveal that each framework has some competitive advantages over the others. In particular, the orientation to the reasoning and the pro-activity of the agents, the presence of native tools for communication and ontology and the predisposition to the widespread deployment of the code require a careful analysis of the software requirements for the choice of the most suitable framework.