Agents United: An Open Platform for Multi-Agent Conversational Systems

The development of applications with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) often comes with integration of multiple complex components. In this article we present the Agents United Platform: an open source platform that researchers and developers can use as a starting point to setup their own multi-IVA applications. The new platform provides developers with a set of integrated components in a sense-remember-think-act architecture. Integrated components are a sensor framework, memory component, Topic Selection Engine, interaction manager (Flipper), two dialogue execution engines, and two behaviour realisers (ASAP and GRETA) of which the agents can seamlessly interact with each other. This article discusses the platform and its individual components. It also highlights some of the novelties that arise from the integration of components and elaborates on directions for future work.