Two agent-oriented programming approaches checked against a coordination problem

Abstract

This paper discusses two approaches to agent-oriented programming and compares them from a practical point of view. The first approach is exemplified by Jadescript, which is an agent-oriented programming language that has been recently proposed to simplify the adoption of JADE. The second approach is exemplified by Jason, which is currently one of the most popular agent-oriented programming languages. Jason can be configured to use JADE to support the distribution of agents, which ensures that the discussed comparison between the two approaches can also take into account the performance of implemented multi-agent systems. In order to devise a quantitative comparison, the two considered languages are used to solve the same coordination problem, and obtained implementations are compared to discuss advantages and drawbacks of the two approaches.