Toward Interaction-Oriented Programming
Munindar P. Singh · NCSU Libraries Repository (North Carolina State University Libraries) · 1996
Although much progress has been made in agent theory and practice, bottlenecks remain in the construction of complex multiagent systems.We introduce interaction-oriented programming (IOP) as an approach to orchestrate the interactions among agents.IOP is more tractable and practical than general agent programming, especially in settings such as open information environments, where the internal details of autonomously developed agents are not available.IOP facilitates multiagent system design by enabling declarative speci cation and enactment of agent interactions, thereby channeling the intellectual energies of designers into the most amenable and eective design tasks.We develop an event algebra to specify interactions among agents.We automatically compile these declarative speci cations into executable temporal logic constraints.These are eciently processed at run-time to produce the desired behavior in a distributed manner.We have implemented the above modules in a (concurrent) actor language.