Agent-oriented model-driven development for JADE with the JADEL programming language

摘要

This paper describes, from motivations and main objectives to actual implementation, a novel agent-oriented programming language called JADEL. JADEL is designed to support the effective implementation of JADE agents and multi-agent systems in the scope of real world model-driven development because it concretely helps developers by natively supporting agent-oriented abstractions, and because it is based on mature industrial-strength technologies. The four core abstractions that JADEL supports, namely agents, behaviours, communication ontologies, and interaction protocols, are presented by gradually introducing the specific syntaxes that the language provides for them. In the last part of the paper, a complete example of a simple JADEL multi-agent system is presented and discussed. Such an example is a well-known example from the official distribution of JADE and many programmers learned the basics of JADE from it. The choice of this example allows comparing JADEL source code with reference Java source code using JADE, and it clearly emphasizes the practical advantages of agent-oriented programming.