for Multi-Agent Systems

Real-world applications are usually characterized by heterogeneous distributed entities that in-teract following complex coordination protocols and that dynamically and autonomously mod-ify their strategies during this interaction; these systems are extremely difficult to model andimplement, and traditional software engineering tools and techniques are often insufficient tocope with this complexity. For this reason a new software engineering paradigm, the Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) has joined, over the past ten years, more traditionalapproaches. AOSE analyzes and designs systems based on the key abstraction of the agent, anautonomous entity situated in some environment, able to perceive the environment itself andto react to changes occurring in it, able to take the initiative when appropriate and capable ofcommunication with other agents in the system. Different approaches have been studied to en-gineer multi-agent systems (MAS), comprising structured but non-mathematical methodologiesas well as logic-based ones. ARPEGGIO, an ongoing software engineering international projectinvolving logic programming groups from USA, Australia and Italy, is designing a logic-basedprototyping environment for engineering this kind of complex applications using mainly (but notonly) logic-based languages.The focus of this thesis is thus on multi-agent system development environments which uselogic-based approaches to specification and implementation. Our contribution is three-fold:1. We have described many informal and formal approaches to AOSE, with particular atten-tion to the last ones. We have analyzed different kinds of logics and, for each of them, wehave provided the description and an example of use of one agent specification languagesbased on it.2. We have analyzed some existing MAS Development Kits (MASDKs) to understand whichengineering approach, if any, is more commonly adopted and which could be the desideratafor a more powerful environment as ARPEGGIO aims to become. We have compared anddrawn a taxonomy of five MASDKs and we have provided rules of thumb to chose theright MASDK to do the right thing.3. Finally, we have designed the extension of two logic-based MASDKs, IMPACT and CaseLP,with new capabilities. IMPACT has been extended to deal with errors (IMPACT error-tolerant agents), and CaseLP has been extended to become a multi-language distributedenvironment which could integrate, in the future, the IMPACT specification language, thustaking a first concrete step towards ARPEGGIO’s development. A Samuele, il mio piccolo sole