Tech Reports

ULCS-02-010

Desiderata for Agent Oriented Programming Languages

Marc-Philippe Huget

Abstract

Multiagent system designers need programming languages in order to develop agents and multiagent systems. Current approaches consist to use classical programming languages like C or C++ and above all Java which is the most preferred language by the agent community thanks to its rich library of functions. The aim of Java is not to design multiagent systems, so it does not encompass multiagent features. The aim of this paper is to present a set of characteristics which could be present in an agent-oriented programming language. This paper also describes what kind of multiagent systems could be developed with this set of characteristics. As a consequence of its success, we compare Java to these features. Results demonstrate how Java is appealing for agent community. A proposed solution is not to ignore Java but to consider a superlayer of Java which uses Java functions and has an agent decomposition.

Keywords: Multiagent systems, Multiagent programming, Agent-oriented programming languages, Desiderata

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