Developing agents

Create and customize your own agent to perform the tasks that you want. The Agent Building and Learning Environment (ABLE) toolkit and its associated documentation provide a working development environment and a template agent that can be used as a guide for developing your own agents.

ABLE is a Java™ framework, component library, and productivity tool kit for building intelligent agents using machine learning and reasoning.

You can use the ABLE toolkit to develop your own hybrid intelligent agents. This Java framework has its own rule language called ABLE rule language (ARL) and its own GUI-based interactive development environment, the ABLE Agent Editor; both are provided to assist in the construction of ABLE agents.

ABLE 2.0

Both the ABLE toolkit and complete ABLE documentation are available to download in .zip packages.

The iSeries™ Navigator Intelligent Agents console is included with a template agent that you can use as a guideline for developing agents to work with the console. The source code for AbleEserverTemplateAgent is stored in ableplatform.jar, located in QIBM/ProdData/OS400/Able.

AbleEserverTemplateAgent makes use of many of the features available when developing agents using the ABLE framework. It demonstrates how an agent would create a set of capabilities that could be managed through the console. It includes a Customize panel that can be used to alter agent settings and an About panel that is used to display information about the agent. It also shows how an agent uses the logging service to log requests and history entries that can be displayed and responded to through the console.

Agent capabilities

The EServerTemplateAgent agent has the following capabilities:

• Time monitor

  The agent watches for minute and hour changing events and take action. There are four different situations that the agent follow depending on what the capability is set to, or how the user responds to a request if one is logged:

  1. Log the change without telling the time.

  2. Log the change including the time as a long.

  3. Log the change including the time in MM/DD/YY format

  4. Do nothing

• Duplicate request

  The agent watches for multiple hour and minute change requests. There are two different situations that the agent follows with this capability if a duplicate is found.

  1. Create a duplicate request

  2. Do not create a duplicate request

Customization panel

The agent supplies a customization panel that allows you to adjust the interval at which the agent checks if the minute or hour has changed.