State controlled execution for agent-object hybrid languages

Abstract

This paper explores some ideas about the implementation of state controlled execution for a language centered on agent interaction protocols. Such an approach could be useful because there an increasingly strong interest on the notion of role in the multiagent system domain. The strong recurrence role and the almos spontaneous appearance of interactio protocols in most practical applications of MAS, and the strong similarities this situation has with the pre-existing notion of class on the object oriented sense, suggest the high relevance of roles and the need of having adequate notational and programming artifacts to represent them. © Springer-Verlag 2004.