Agreement Technologies Environment (ATE) is an open environment of services for the implementation of multi-agent systems and applications that require agreements technology, such as virtual markets, online trading systems, contract management systems, systems of conflict resolution, etc. The environment offers a repository of services agreement and an application execution environment agreement. It also offers a development methodology that allows it to integrate the new services agreement.
We chose OSGi as the technological framework to support the development of ATE as a service-based environment. This choice allows us to follow the de facto industry standard software, and provides a modular environment where the different working groups can collaborate more easily. Specifically, we choose Apache Felix as the OSGi framework to develop the modules (bundles) and services.
First, download the binary file wherever you want. Next, launch the download environment file by either double-clicking on it or running “java -jar org.agreement_technologies.environment-X.jar” from a terminal, where X is the version of the ATE you have been downloaded. Then the environment automatically load the bundles that are in the directory “.at/environment/plugins” from the user home directory. If you are running in a graphical environment, this action will be show the environment user interface.
The execution of the ATE will be modified using some parameters, the main ones are: