Eleonora Iotti

Interaction protocols in the JADEL programming language

This paper presents the support for interaction protocols that has been recently added to the JADEL programming language. JADEL is an agent-oriented programming language designed to ease the development of JADE agents and multi-agent systems by offering general-purpose agent-oriented abstractions to the programmer. The first part of the paper presents JADEL and motivates the need for a new agent-oriented programming language. Then, the agent-oriented abstractions that JADEL has been providing since its first version-namely agents, behaviours and communication ontologies-are described. The new support for interaction protocols is finally presented, and a simple example of a JADEL multi-agent system that uses interaction protocols is reported. The paper is concluded with an overview of the current state of JADEL and related tools.

Core Features of an Agent-Oriented Domain-Specific Language for JADE Agents

This paper presents the core features of JADEL, an agent-oriented domain-specific programming language for the construction of JADE agents, behaviours and ontologies. The work on JADEL originates from the need to assist programmers by means of tools that reduce the complexity and speed up the construction of a JADE agents and multi-agent systems. The features of JADEL discussed in this paper include abstractions for the main entities of JADE—agents, behaviours and ontologies—and they also encompass the features needed for the construction of domain-specific tasks, thus enriching JADE APIs with novel and simple notations.

A Comparison between Asynchronous Backtracking Pseudocode and its JADEL Implementation.

In this paper, a comparison between the pseudocode of a well-known algorithm for solving distributed constraint satisfaction problems and the implementation of such an algorithm in JADEL is given. First, background and motivations behind JADEL development are illustrated. Then, we make a description of the problem and a brief introduction to JADEL. The core of this work consists in the translation of the algorithm pseudocode in JADEL code, which is described in details. Scope of the paper is to evaluate such a translation, in terms of closeness to pseudocode, complexity, amount of code written and performance.

An outline of the use of transition systems to formalize JADE agents and multi-agent systems

This paper presents the key aspects of a proposed formalization of JADE agents and multi-agent systems based on transition systems. Such a formalization is meant to be useful to describe and clarify how JADE multi-agent systems work and to provide a theoretical instrument to validate and analyze the semantics of JADE agents. This is needed to decouple agent-oriented and object-oriented parts of an agent design and to avoid misunderstandings on the semantics of JADE agents. The chosen approach is to define a structural operational semantics for Java programs written using JADE, and the proposed formalization consists in two parts: the first identifies and defines the main entities that together compose a JADE multi-agent system; the second provides the transition system and rewriting rules. The paper terminates with two explanatory examples of the usage of the transition system. A brief recapitulation of the work concludes the paper.

An Illustrative Example of the JADEL Programming Language

This paper presents a case study intended to investigate the features of JADEL, an agent-oriented programming language designed to ease the development of JADE agents and multi-agent systems. The paper first motivates the need for JADEL, and it briefly shows the main features of the language. Then, a well-known problem originally designed to assess the features of actor-based programming languages is recalled, and a possible solution implemented in JADEL is presented. The proposed solution is intended to validate the features of the language that concern concurrency and distribution, and it can be used as a guideline to use JADEL to target problems expressed in terms of agents that cooperate to bring about joint goals.

A Quantitative Assessment of the JADEL Programming Language

This paper reports a quantitative assessment of JADEL, an agent-oriented programming language designed to implement JADE agents and multi-agent systems. The assessment is structured in two parts. The first part is intended to evaluate the effectiveness of JADEL for the concrete implementation of agent-based algorithms expressed using a pseudocode. The second part examines the functionality of the language regarding concurrency and message passing by comparing the implementation in JADEL of a set of benchmark algorithms with the corresponding implementations in Scala. The metrics introduced for the two parts of the assessment are meant to evaluate the expressiveness and ease of use of JADEL, and reported results are encouraging.