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Zeus is an open source agent development tool kit that was created as part of the Midas and Agentcities research projects at BT in the late 1990's and early 2000's.

Zeus won a BCS Gold medal for its technical innovation, and has been successfully used in many experimental projects within BT and in the rest of the world. Zeus is written in Java and features facilities to implement BDI style (not quite BDI) agents, agents with reactive rule bases, agents with intelligent message handling functionality and DAML-S service descriptions. The reasoners in Zeus include a Rete style rule engine which uses CLIPS type rule definitions that can be extended and plugged in Java, a simple distributed planner and graph style agent rationality (you can build graphs to describe the problem solving behavior of the agent that you want). A simple ontology is used to integrate the concepts in the agent between the different sub systems.

There are visualisation, scripting and monitoring tools as well as a simple agent building environment.

A version of Zeus is available under an open source license from http://sourceforge.net/projects/zeusagent.

Documentation that further explains how what Zeus is and how to use it is also available.

The Zeus Agent Realisation Guide
The Zeus Technical Manual

If asked to give a short summary of Zeus we would say that it is an interesting example of how various agent technologies developed in the late 1990's could fit together, but that it needs to be brought up to date with integration to web service standards and to integrate concepts like P2P infrastructures and sophisticated reasoners like polynomial time auctions and negotiations, goal semantics, POMDP's, game based bidding rationality, trust and reputation, and stronger planing. We would also say that Zeus is very hard to program effectively and lacks strong mechanisms for encapsulation and reuse.

A lot of the rational for Agent systems like Zeus has been erroded by the development of three tier development techniques and containers for eBusiness applications like Spring. However, the core of the technology remains the development of Autonomy and Multi-Agent interaction. If you are interested in this kind of thing then you will find more in the conferences on Autonmous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

These topics and others that are even more interesting are under investigation by the Autonomous Research Team in the Intelligent Systems Research Centre at BT.

For more information on Zeus contact Simon Thompson at simon<dot>2<dot>thompson <at> bt<dot>com