Continuations pour la programmation de comportement d'agent

Continuations are a well established programming concept that allows capturing and resuming the current program state. They can be found in several functional programming languages (such as Scheme), in Hewitt actor model, and more recently in dynamic programming languages (such as Ruby, Smalltalk, Python, and even Javascript or Java). They have been historically applied to automaton programming, cooperative threads, compilation techniques, and have lastly raised interest for web application programming. This paper shows how this concept happens to be especially useful and elegant to program agent behaviors (or behavioral components), by increasing code readability and ease of writing. It is shown that the proposed approach, applied here to the Jade multi-agents platform, facilitates the implementation of interaction protocols in a modular way, one of the main difficulties in conversational agent engineering. MOTS-CLÉS : continuations, systèmes multi-agents conversationnels, génie logiciel orienté agent, composants comportementaux, automates à base de continuations.