The Design of a Coordination Language for Multi-Agent Systems

. The agent view provides a level of abstraction at which we envisage computational systemscarrying out cooperative work by interoperating across networked people, organizations and machines. A major challenge in building such systems is coordinating the behavior of the individual agents to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants. In this paper we propose a conceptualization of the coordination task around the notion of structured "conversation" amongst agents. Based on this notion we build a complete multiagent programming language and system for explicitly representing, applying and capturing coordination knowledge. The language provides KQML-based communication, an agent definition and execution environment, support for describing interactions as multiple structured conversations among agents, rule-based approaches to conversation selection, conversation execution and event handling, a model and an interactive graphical tool for in context acquisition and debuggi..