Programming Social Middlewares through Social Interaction Types

This paper describes a type-oriented approach to the programming of social middlewares. It defines a collection of metamodeling features which allow programmers to declare the social interaction and agent types which make up the program of a multiagent society for some application domain. These features are identified and formalised taking into account a specification of social middlewares as programmable, abstract machines. Thus, the proposed approach results in the type system of an interaction-oriented programming language. The paper uses the C+ action language and the CCALC tool as formal devices, so that metamodeling features are given formal semantics as new social law abbreviations which complement the causal law abbreviations of C+. This programming language approach contrasts with the common modeling approach endorsed by organizational methodologies, and promotes higher levels of formality and reusability in the specification of multiagent societies.