Integrating heterogeneous agent programming platforms within artifact-based environments

“Agents and Artifacts” (A&A) and CARTAGO are becoming increasingly popular as, respectively, a general-purpose programming model and a related infrastructure for developing shared computational environments in agent-based software systems. However, so far there has been no work on developing multiagent systems (MAS) where agents implemented and deployed in different agent-programming platforms can interact as part of the same MAS with a shared environment. Due to the generality of CARTAGO environments and its Java-based implementation, we have successfully implemented an open multi-agent system where heterogeneous agents developed with different platforms—namely Jason, 2APL as BDI-based approaches and simpA as an activityoriented approach rather than BDI-based—work together in shared workspaces where they interact and cooperate by dynamically creating and using shared artifacts, analogously to human working environments. This paper shows how this was achieved by first presenting a general model for incorporating a theory of use and observation of artifacts in cognitive agents, then describing a general approach for developing such heterogeneous MAS using CARTAGO integrated with existing agent-oriented programming platforms.