Integrating jason in a multi-agent platform with support for interaction protocols.

Abstract

Agent communication is a core issue when studying all possible ways for agents to organize and collaborate to achieve their goals. We can count on communication standards, as the FIPA Interaction Protocols. On the other hand we can count on high level agent programming languages, like AgentSpeak, which allow us to model and represent the agent and its knowledge and behavior. In this paper we present a proposal to add to Jason (an interpreter of an extended version of AgentSpeak) a new level of abstraction in the task of programming conversations between agents. The agent communication follows the FIPA interaction protocols. A new entity called Communicator Manager acts as an interface between the agent programming language (Jason) and the platform communication facilities (Magentix 2). This approach allows the programmer to focus on programming the agent knowledge and reasoning parts instead of the interaction protocols. An agent can call the communication manager to start a conversation. The communication manager will control the different steps of the conversation and will modify the agent belief base to represent the results of the different steps of the conversation protocol. Therefore, the agents can use this knowledge in its reasoning process. This approach can be easily transfered to others agent programming languages and platforms.