Prototypes of productivity tools for the jadescript programming language

Jadescript is an agent-oriented programming language built on top of JADE. So far, the focus of the development of the language was on design choices, on syntax refinements, and on the introduction of expressions and constructs for agent-related abstractions and tasks. In this paper, a proposal to achieve the crucial goal of making Jadescript suitable for professional use is presented. The success of Jadescript, as a solid language to build real-world agent-based software systems, is necessarily related to its effective integration with mainstream development tools. In this paper, some of the productivity tools developed to integrate Jadescript with a mainstream development environment are presented as a way to promote the successful adoption of the language towards the community of JADE users

A Comparison between Asynchronous Backtracking Pseudocode and its JADEL Implementation

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SPADE 3: Supporting the New Generation of Multi-Agent Systems

[EN] Although intelligent agent-based systems have existed for several years, the progression in terms of real applications or their integration in the industry have not yet reached the expected levels. During the last two decades, many agent platforms have appeared with the aim of simplifying the development of multi-agent systems. Some of these platforms have been designed for general purposes, while others have been oriented towards specific domains. However, the lack of standards and the complexity associated with supporting such systems, among other difficulties, have hampered their generalised use. This article looks in depth at the current situation of existing agent platforms, trying to analyse their current shortcomings and their expected needs in the near future. The goal of the paper is to identify possible lines of work and some of the most crucial aspects to be considered in order to popularize the application of agent technology as a dynamic and flexible solution to current problems. Moreover, the paper presents SPADE 3, a new version of the SPADE middleware, which has been totally redesigned in order to conform to the identified challenges. Finally, a case study is proposed to illustrate how SPADE 3 is able to fulfill these challenges.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government, under Project RTI2018-095390-B-C31-AR.Palanca Cámara, J.; Terrasa Barrena, AM.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Carrascosa Casamayor, C. (2020). SPADE 3: Supporting the New Generation of Multi-Agent Systems. IEEE Access. 8:182537-182549. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3027357S182537182549

The AbU Language: IoT Distributed Programming Made Easy

Event-driven programming based on Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules allows users to define complex automation routines in a simple, declarative way; for this reason, in recent years ECA rules have been adopted by the majority of companies in the Internet of Things (IoT) industry as a promising paradigm for implementing ubiquitous and pervasive systems. Unfortunately, programming simplicity comes to a price: most implementations of ECA rules are bound to a strongly centralized communication infrastructure, that poses serious limitations on the application scenarios for the IoT, due to scalability, security and availability issues. To mitigate these issues, recent works introduced abstractions for communication and coordination of ensembles of IoT devices in a decentralized setting, effectively moving the computation towards the edge of the network without sacrificing the programming simplicity prerogative of ECA rules. In particular, Attribute-based memory Updates is a communication model transparently enhancing ECA rules-based systems with an interaction mechanism where communication is similar to broadcast but actual receivers are selected on the spot, by means of predicates (i.e., properties) over devices attributes. In this paper, we introduce AbU-dsl, a Domain Specific Language for the IoT that compiles on top of an implementation of Attribute-based memory Updates. In this way, AbU-dsl provides a practical development interface, based on ECA rules, to effectively program IoT devices in a fully decentralized setting, by exploiting a full-fledged attribute-based interaction model. Thus, programmers can specify interactions between devices in a declarative way, abstracting from details such as devices identity, number, or even their existence, without the need for a central controlling service

A Conceptual Generic Framework to Debugging in the Domain-Specific Modeling Languages for Multi-Agent Systems

Despite the existence of many agent programming environments and platforms, the developers may still encounter difficulties on implementing Multi-agent Systems (MASs) due to the complexity of agent features and agent interactions inside the MAS organizations. Working in a higher abstraction layer and modeling agent components within a model-driven engineering (MDE) process before going into depths of MAS implementation may facilitate MAS development. Perhaps the most popular way of applying MDE for MAS is based on creating Domain-specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) with including appropriate integrated development environments (IDEs) in which both modeling and code generation for system-to-be-developed can be performed properly. Although IDEs of these MAS DSMLs provide some sort of checks on modeled systems according to the related DSML\u27s syntax and semantics descriptions, currently they do not have a built-in support for debugging these MAS models. That deficiency causes the agent developers not to be sure on the correctness of the prepared MAS model at the design phase. To help filling this gap, we introduce a conceptual generic debugging framework supporting the design of agent components inside the modeling environments of MAS DSMLs. The debugging framework is composed of 4 different metamodels and a simulator. Use of the proposed framework starts with modeling a MAS using a design language and transforming design model instances to a run-time model. According to the framework, the run-time model is simulated on a built-in simulator for debugging. The framework also provides a control mechanism for the simulation in the form of a simulation environment model

OntologyBeanGenerator 5.0: Extending ontology concepts with methods and exceptions

When modeling and implementing complex systems based on agents and artifacts, achieving semantic interoperability is not only useful, but often necessary. A commonly adopted solution to manage complex and real MASs is adopting a Model Driven methodology, which uses an ontology as the formal representation of the domain, and then exploiting some existing tool to automatically generate code for agents in the MAS, to let them interact according to the model. While this approach is satisfactorily supported when the target MAS environment is Jason, less support is provided to Jade MASs, despite Jade's large adoption for real MASs development. So, considering the great support given by the automatic code generation starting from a formal model, and the large community working on Jade MASs, in this work we present an extension of the OntologyBeanGenerator plugin for Prot\ue9g\ue9, used to generate a Java representation of an OWL ontology for Jade. We improved the OntologyBeanGenerator tool to support the modeling of exceptions, formalized at the ontology level, and of methods associated with ontology elements, to set the interface of concrete objects (artifacts) at design stage. This extension allows us to integrate in a Model Driven approach a support for the formal definition of artifacts and provide an automatic generation of Jade code/interfaces to interact with them respecting the model

Logic-based Technologies for Multi-agent Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Precisely when the success of artificial intelligence (AI) sub-symbolic techniques makes them be identified with the whole AI by many non-computerscientists and non-technical media, symbolic approaches are getting more and more attention as those that could make AI amenable to human understanding. Given the recurring cycles in the AI history, we expect that a revamp of technologies often tagged as “classical AI” – in particular, logic-based ones will take place in the next few years. On the other hand, agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have been at the core of the design of intelligent systems since their very beginning, and their long-term connection with logic-based technologies, which characterised their early days, might open new ways to engineer explainable intelligent systems. This is why understanding the current status of logic-based technologies for MAS is nowadays of paramount importance. Accordingly, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive view of those technologies by making them the subject of a systematic literature review (SLR). The resulting technologies are discussed and evaluated from two different perspectives: the MAS and the logic-based ones

Middle-out domain-specific aspect languages and their application in agent-based modelling runtime inspection

Domain-Specific Aspect Languages (DSALs) are a valuable tool for separating cross-cutting concerns, particularly within fields with endemic cross-cutting practices. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) runtime inspection, which cuts across the core concern of model development, serves as a prime example. Despite their usefulness, DSALs face multiple adoption issues: the literature regarding their development and use is incohesive, coupling to a weave target hinders re-use, and available tooling is immature compared to Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). We believe these issues can be aided by furthering DSL middle-out techniques for DSALs.We first define the background of what a DSAL is and how they may be used, moving onto how we can use DSL techniques to further DSALs. We develop a middle-out semantic model approach for developing domain-level DSALs with transparent aspect orientation using adaptions of DSL techniques. We have implemented the approach for model-specific DSALs for the in-house framework Animaux, and as middleware-specific DSAL for agent messages in the JADE framework, which can be specialised to models using extension DSALs. We give illustrative result cases using our implementations to provide a base of the user development costs and performance of this approach.In conclusion, we believe the adoption of these technologies aids ABM applications and encourage future work in similar fields. This thesis has given a base philosophy toward DSLs, a novel approach for the development of middle-out DSALs and illustrative cases of this approach

Agent-oriented domain-specific language for the development of intelligentdistributed non-axiomatic reasoning agents

У дисертацији је представљен прототип агентског, домен-оријентисаног језика ALAS. Основни мотиви развоја ALAS језика су подршка дистрибуираном не-аксиоматском резоновању као и омогућавање интероперабилности и хетерогене мобилности Siebog агената јер је приликом анализе постојећих агентских домен-оријентисаних језика утврђено да ни један језик не подржава ове захтеве. Побољшање у односу на сличне постојеће агентске, домен-оријентисане језике огледа се и у програмским конструктима које нуди ALAS језик а чија је основна сврха писање концизних агената који се извршавају у специфичним доменима.U disertaciji je predstavljen prototip agentskog, domen-orijentisanog jezika ALAS. Osnovni motivi razvoja ALAS jezika su podrška distribuiranom ne-aksiomatskom rezonovanju kao i omogućavanje interoperabilnosti i heterogene mobilnosti Siebog agenata jer je prilikom analize postojećih agentskih domen-orijentisanih jezika utvrđeno da ni jedan jezik ne podržava ove zahteve. Poboljšanje u odnosu na slične postojeće agentske, domen-orijentisane jezike ogleda se i u programskim konstruktima koje nudi ALAS jezik a čija je osnovna svrha pisanje konciznih agenata koji se izvršavaju u specifičnim domenima.The dissertation presents the prototype of an agent-oriented, domainspecific language ALAS. The basic motives for the development of the ALAS language are support for distributed non-axiomatic reasoning, as well as enabling the interoperability and heterogeneous mobility of agents, because it is concluded by analysing existing agent-oriented, domainspecific languages, that there is no language that supports these requirements. The improvement compared to similar existing agentoriented, domain-specific languages are also reflected in program constructs offered by ALAS language, whose the main purpose is to enable writing the concise agents that are executed in specific domains