A FIPA-ACL based communication utility for Unity

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) allow facing complex, heterogeneous, distributed problems difficult to solve by only one software agent. Games often provide very adequate problems for the use of MAS. In the field of Games, Unity is one of the most used video game engines and allows the development of intelligent agents in 2D/3D virtual environments. However, although Unity allows working in multi-agent environments it does not provide functionalities to facilitate the development of genuine MAS. One crucial functionality is to allow agents to communicate and understand each other through an agent communication language (ACL). The objective of this work is to supply Unity with this capacity, adding support for the creation, sending and reception of messages. As a result, a communication system and an ACL are provided that facilitate the development of MAS in Unity, allowing to solve problems that require collaborative solutions among agents.