Agent development platforms for bioinformatics

Abstract

During the past decade, Molecular Biology wet labs and sequencing activities have been generating a vast amount of data, causing an increase in the adoption of new methods and tools for identification and analysis. In particular, the use of software agent technology in bioinformatics applications has been on the rise, due some of its unique features as autonomy and remote execution capabilities. However, nowadays there exists multiple software agent development platforms, and their potential application to bioinformatics require an assessment based on their inherent features. We therefore present a comparative analysis of the main available platforms focusing on standard compatibility, communication, mobility, security policy, availability, usability and development issues. Our result, based on a scoring system, demonstrate that the JADE platform is the most appropriate and promising one to be used in tackling bioinformatics problems.