Role of Agent Middleware in Teaching Distributed Network Application Development

Role of Agent Middleware in Teaching Distributed Systems and Agent Technologies

“…Another course we deeply considered in this paper is the Agent Technologies course, which has been offered for the past several years at the Faculty of Technical Sciences, UNS, Serbia, inspired by [9] and subsequently improved [2]. Students have had classes and exercises performed using Siebog in-house agent middleware, which is being actively developed at the UNS for more than 10 years.…”

“…For their future jobs in ICT companies, students would benefit from learning and understanding new and challenging environments and implementations of softwares such as ubiquitous and pervasive computing, sensor networks, Internet of things, high-performance computing, mobile computing, cloud computing and even collective intelligence [1]. Therefore, rigorous design, integration, and harmonization of various topics of distributed systems and agent technologies into CS and ICT curricula presents a permanent task requiring expertise adaptation of educators and students [2]. Despite the fact that there are different courses on distributed systems and agent technologies delivered at universities world-wide, there are not too many papers that report on educational effects and students' motivation, results and achievements.…”

“…Extensive experiences in teaching several undergraduate courses on distributed systems and agents and multi-agent frameworks at our two universities are presented in [2], [9]. We paid attention to three key issues in our courses.…”

“…Our intention within AT course at the University of Novi Sad was to prepare a smooth introduction in agent technology and multi-agent systems (MASs) using, as much as possible, our previously developed teaching resources and self-developed software tools for creation of MASs [2], [9]. The main advantage of our approach is that we use in-house agent middleware developed within our research activities, for teaching as well.…”