Using the Blackboard

Agents never directly see the blackboard, but only the AgentTransport. Thus, the interaction of most agents and the blackboard are limited. Usually, all that the developer needs to know what to do with the blackboard is to learn how to start and stop it.

The simplest way to start a blackboard is via MicaRunner. Simply adding a blackboard tag to the runner XML configuration file will provide support for a blackboard running on the local machine.

The alternative is to start a blackboard manually from the command line. For an SQL Blackboard with a XML-over-TCP transport, this is simply done using the XMLOverTCPBlackboard class:

% java unsw.cse.mica.blackboard.XMLOverTCPBlackboard

This starts a blackboard transport at port 8500 on the local host, with all the default settings. The default settings can be overridden using the following command-line parameters: