AT Winter School 2017 Tutors

Olivier Boissier. Multi-Agent Oriented Programming of Collective Autonomous Systems: a short and practical introduction to the JaCaMo platform.

Research on Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has led to the development of several models, languages, and technologies for programming not only agents, but also their interaction, the application environment where they are situated, as well as the organisation in which they participate. Research on those topics moved from Agent-Oriented Programming towards Multi-Agent Oriented Programming (MAOP). This tutorial introduce how to program a collective autonomous systems using a structured set of concepts and associated first-class design and programming abstractions that go beyond the concepts normally associated with agents. They include those related to environment, interaction, organisation, and so forth. Using the JaCaMo platform, students will gain a practical skill on developing such systems. JaCaMo is a platform for MAOP built on top of three seamlessly integrated dimensions (i.e. structured sets of concepts and associated execution platforms): for programming BDI agents, their artifact-based environments, and their normative organisations. The key purpose of JaCaMo is to support programmers in exploring the synergy between these dimensions, providing a comprehensive and clear programming model, as well as a corresponding platform for developing and running collectives of autonomous agents. This tutorial will provide a practical overview of MAOP illustrated using JaCaMo. We show how emphasizing one particular dimension leads to different solutions to the same problem, and discuss the issues of each of those solutions.