Reusable components for implementing agent interactions

Abstract

Engineering component interactions is a major challenge in the development of large-scale, open systems. In the realm of multiagent system research, organizational abstractions have been proposed to overcome the complexity of this task. However, the gap between these modeling abstractions, and the constructs provided by todays agent-oriented software frameworks is still rather big. This paper reports on the RICA-J multiagent programming framework, which provides executable constructs for each of the organizational, ACL-based modeling abstractions of the RICA theory. Setting out from a components and connectors perspective on the elements of the RICA metamodel, their executions semantics is defined and instrumented on top of the JADE platform. Moreover, a systematic reuse approach to the engineering of interactions is put forward. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.