Abstract
A fully-fledged programming paradigm based on ideas from multi-agent systems requires a lot more than early agent-oriented programming languages envisaged. More than interaction between autonomous entities, the social level of multi-agent systems as well as the shared environment where the agents are situated also need to be suitably designed. In fact, the abstractions used at each of those three levels are all equally important and interrelated. In this chapter, we discuss JaCaMo, a platform for multi-agent-oriented programming that covers abstractions such as: beliefs, goals, and plans at the agent level; groups, roles, functional schemes (i.e., social plans), and norms at the organizational level; and artifacts and workspaces at the environment level. The chapter also includes a simple multi-agent system example to illustrate the approach.
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Notes
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At runtime, the organization program is available to agents and the organization infrastructure as an XML file.
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There is further ongoing work on normative programming in the context of JaCaMo that removes the burden of reporting back when goals have been achieved, as with that work it is possible to specify which environment changes count as the achievement of organizational goals [6].
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As usual in multi-agent systems, communication in JaCaMo is based on speech acts, therefore making explicit to the receiver the intentions of the sender of a message (i.e., agents use asynchronous communication); for formal details, see [19].
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Rafael Cauê Cardoso for proofreading and to Ismael Jabes da Silva Santos for suggesting the metal workshop example used in this chapter. Rafael Bordini and Jomi Hübner are grateful for the support given by CNPq grant numbers 307924/2009-2 and 307350/2009-6.
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Boissier, O., Bordini, R.H., Hübner, J.F., Ricci, A. (2014). Unravelling Multi-agent-Oriented Programming. In: Shehory, O., Sturm, A. (eds) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54432-3_13
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