A Study On The Execution Model And The Supporting Environment Of Oragent: An Agent-oriented Programming Language

In the field of agent-oriented software engineering, the organisation-basedprogramming approach attempts to introduce organisational concepts intoimplementation, in order to provide high-level abstraction and programming facilitieswhich facilitates the development and maintenance of dynamic and flexible multi-agentsystems. However, due to the lack of effective programming languages and supportingplatforms, the acceptance of such an approach by industry community has been quitelimited. Supporting implementation of organisational concepts as first-class entities byproviding explicit language primitives is therefore critical for promoting the applicationof organisation-based programming approach in industry.Oragent is an organisation-based agent-oriented programming language whichsupports implementing organisational concepts as first-class entities, and providesexplicit language primitives for realising organisation mechanisms such as roleenactment and role-based message transport. It is expected to effectively facilitate theconstructing and running of dynamic and flexible multi-agent systems. We propose theruntime model for Oragent language by analysing its conceptual model and coresemantics. Based on this runtime model, Oragentburg—the runtime environment ofOragent programs, is developed by extending JADE—an agent-centered middlewareplatform. Oragentburg supports the lifecycle management of mulit-agent systems, therealisation of role enactment, the role-based message transport among agents, etc. Wealso develop the translator from Oragent programs to its equivalent Java class fileswhich can run on Oragentburg, and realise the dynamic loading of Oragent programs.An example probram case study is presented in order to demonstrate the viability ofOragent runtime model and Oragentburg platform.