Programming Agents by Their Social Relationships: A Commitment-Based Approach

Multiagent systems can be seen as an approach to software engineering for the design and development of complex, distributed software. Generally speaking, multiagent systems provide two main abstractions for modularizing the software: the agents and the environment where agents operate. In this pape...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inAlgorithms Vol. 12; no. 4; p. 76
Main Authors Baldoni, Matteo, Baroglio, Cristina, Micalizio, Roberto, Tedeschi, Stefano
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.04.2019
Subjects
agent-oriented software engineering
agents and artifacts
Communication
Cooperation
Infrastructure
Multiagent systems
Protocol
social commitments
Software engineering
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Multiagent systems can be seen as an approach to software engineering for the design and development of complex, distributed software. Generally speaking, multiagent systems provide two main abstractions for modularizing the software: the agents and the environment where agents operate. In this paper, we argue that also the social relationships among the agents should be expressed explicitly and become first-class objects both at design- and at development-time. In particular, we propose to represent social relationships as commitments that are reified as resources in the agents’ environment and can be directly manipulated by the agents via standard operations. We demonstrate that this view induces an agent programming schema that is substantially independent of the actual agent platform, provided that commitments are available as explained. The paper exemplifies the schema on two agent platforms, JADE and JaCaMo, where commitments are made available via the 2COMM library.
ISSN:1999-4893
1999-4893
DOI:10.3390/a12040076