Version 1.03b - May 2000. © 1996-9 British Telecommunications Plc.

Introduction

You have at your fingertips the ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit - an integrated development environment for creating multi-agent systems. It is the result of several years' work by members of the BT Labs' Intelligent Systems Research Group.

It is also the product of an ongoing open source effort under this license. This ZeusAgent page at sourceforge should give you some more information on what we are up to, and also access to resources such as bug fixing and support for your vital technical questions.

So far ZEUS has been used on several projects at BT and by a number of external groups. There experiences have driven the evolution of the toolkit, and contributed to the system that you have today. However, we are keen to continue the development process so:

• Do the development tools facilitate the rapid engineering of agent applications? If not - how can the development methodology be improved?
• Are the prewritten agent components robust and useful? Do they function efficiently and correctly? If not, how can they be improved?
• Are the agents provided by ZEUS suitable for a variety of distributed applications? And if not, what features need to be added?

Please take the time to complete this survey.

News and updates can be found at the ZEUS project homepage.

Version History

0.5   Oct 97    ZEUS prototype (BCS Computing Award winner)
1.0   May 99    The first public release of ZEUS
1.01  Sept 99   Maintenance release
1.02  Nov 99    First Open Source Release
1.03b May 00    Maintenance release

1.04  XXX XX 	Putative release for this page

What's New since Version 1.00

• Bug fixes
• Performance Enhancements
• New Case Study - The Maze Solver
• JavaDoc documentation included
• Online help added to Agent Generator tool

Installation

The file you have unpacked to obtain this Readme file contains one other file: an 'InstallShield' self-extracting archive containing the ZEUS toolkit. To extract the toolkit you must have a Java 1.2 (aka Java2) runtime environment installed on your system. ZEUS is then installed using the following command:

java zeusinstall

Ensure that the current directory '.' appears in your CLASSPATH, otherwise the Java interpreter will not be able to run the installer

This will launch the 'InstallShield' installation program that should be familiar to PC users, then just follow the onscreen instructions. Most of the installation is automatic, although you will be prompted to choose where to install the toolkit.

We recommend installing into a directory called 'zeus', (e.g. d:\zeus on PCs or /home/you/zeus on Unix). The install directory should be a complete path, i.e. including the partition letter on PCs, or relative to / on Unix.

Important Note for Existing Users: If you already have an earlier version of ZEUS installed on your machine the installer will overwrite it. So if you have made any changes to the examples applications - move them to another location for safe-keeping before installing the new version.

Changing your CLASSPATH

Before you can run the ZEUS example applications or the ZEUS Generator tool you must modify the CLASSPATH environment variable used by your Java interpreter so it can locate the ZEUS class files. This involves adding the following:

$INSTALL_DIR$/lib/zeus.jar:$INSTALL_DIR$/lib/gnu-regexp.jar

Where $INSTALL_DIR$ is the location you have chosen to install ZEUS; the instructions for this process are also displayed during the installation process.

your classpath should look something like:

.;..;c:\java1.2\bin\rt.jar;c:\zeus\lib\zeus.jar;c:\zeus\lib\gnu-regexp.jar

In WindowsNT classpaths are changed by opening the System icon on the Control Panel. Switch to the Environment pane, and edit the Variable and Value fields to set the classpath. Check the lists of variable values before making a new entry, and append the zeus.jar and gnu-regexp.jar entries to any pre-existing setting. if you have no setting then make variable and value into something like:

variable := classpath

value := .;..;c:\java1.2\bin\rt.jar;c:\zeus\lib\zeus.jar;c:\zeus\lib\gnu-regexp.jar

press Set, then Apply and then OK.

You can also set a class path by typing

set classpath = ".;..;c:\java1.2\bin\rt.jar;c:\zeus\lib\zeus.jar;c:\zeus\lib\gnu-regexp.jar"

in a dos window. But please note: this setting will only apply to that window, and only for the life span of the window.

In UNIX the classpath value is set in .cshrc/.bashrc/.tcsh file according to the syntax of those particular shell. Contact your sysadmin for help if you are unsure.

Classpath values on Macs are a mystery to me.

The ZEUS Package

The installation process writes the following directories into the specified installation location:

api
This directory contains JavaDoc documentation of the application programmer's interfaces provided within the top-level ZEUS packages. These packages contain classes that developers are likely to interact with when writing their own program code. The undocumented packages are unlikely to be of interest to developers.

docs
The ZEUS documentation consists of several large files, and so they are not currently included in the standard ZEUS distribution. Instead, they can be downloaded from our web pages and saved in this directory. The available ZEUS documents are listed and hyperlinked here . These include several Case Studies that describe how the sample applications were built, how they are run, and how they work.

examples
This contains the source code and support files for the example applications.

gifs
This contains the 256-colour icons used throughout the toolkit, as well as the embedded graphics within the on-line documentation.

help
This directory contains the hypertext files of the on-line help documentation. As all the help files are written in HTML they can also be read off-line using a web browser, the sub-directories are organised by subject to facilitate this.

lib
This directory contains 2 Java archive (JAR) files:
zeus.jar - which holds the compiled class code for the toolkit
gnu-regexp.jar - classes needed by the GNU regular expression parser

Both these files must be known to your Java interpreter for the toolkit to be used. During the installation you will be shown instructions on how to add the locations of these files into your CLASSPATH environment variable.

source.zip
This is a zip archive file containing all the ZEUS source code. As the toolkit has already been compiled into the lib/zeus.jar file, this provides a logical way of separating the core ZEUS code from the application code written by developers. Hence the ZEUS source code is only intended for reference purposes and to facilitate debugging. If you intend modifying ZEUS this archive can be unzipped into a directory called 'zeus' (to preserve the package names) and recompiled. As we retain the canonical version of the source code, please send us any bug-fixes or improvements you make, and we will consider incorporating them.

licence.html
The open source licence under which ZEUS is distributed.

readme.html
You're reading it.

getting-started.txt
Guidance on what to do once the toolkit is installed.

Another file created during installation, but not written into the installation directory is...

.zeus.prp
This contains the parameters that configure the ZEUS toolkit, the contents of which will only be of interest to advanced users. This file is written into your home directory, this is ~ on Unix machines, \winnt\profiles\yourname\ on NT machines and c:\windows on Windows 95. You can test whether this file can be correctly created by running the ZeusPrpTest Java program located in the examples directory. The first line of the .zeus.prp file is the most important as it tells the ZEUS toolkit where it has been installed. If you move the ZEUS directory make sure you update this file with its new location.

The ZEUS Mailing List

We have recently created a mailing list for ZEUS users, which is hosted by Mailbase, a UK-based academic mailing list server. The objectives of the mailing list are:

• to enable ZEUS users to share information, expertise and ideas
• to provide a better means of technical support, (all technical queries should be addressed to the list, which will facilitate collaborative problem solving)

All messages sent to the mailing list will be archived and readable online from the mailing list home page. The mailing list has deliberately been left open, so you don't have to subscribe to post, and anyone can read the archived messages through the web page. But if you'd like to join, you'll find instructions listed here. Our hope is to be able to build a virtual community of ZEUS users that will do for collaborative agents what Aglets did for mobile agents.

What's Missing

The v1.03b, just as v1.02, distribution of ZEUS has some functionality not present in this release that was present in previous versions. The omissions are:

• The Control Tool - although present in the early ZEUS prototypes the inclusion of new Agent Generator components have meant this needs to be reimplemented.
• The Remote Viewer - this client-server version of the Agent Viewer is shown as one of the options of the Visualiser Hub, but is not yet implemented.

Hopefully the missing components should be ready in time for the next maintenance release, along with the remaining gaps in the documentation.

Known Bugs