Between Design and Implementation of Multi-Agent Systems: A Component-Based Two-Step Process

International audienceIn order to ease the development of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), we propose a two-step process named SpEArAF (Species to Engineer Architectures for Agent Frameworks) that aims to facilitate the transition between design and implementation and to promote reuse. The idea is to build, in the first step, a specialised and reusable framework (a programming library) that fits the application requirements, particularly concerning the agents and their interaction abilities. In order to do that, application-specific ``species'' of agents are defined, then realised as architectures in a component-based manner, and finaly implemented by either programming new components or reusing existing code. This step defines ``how'' agents work and is done in order to provide adequate programming abstractions depending on the ability and skills of the end-user developer. In the second step, end-users implement the MAS by defining application-level behaviours of agents via the dedicated programming mechanisms at the level of abstraction provided by the framework. This step defines ``what'' agents do to realise the functionality of the MAS. In practice, SpEArAF relies on Make Agents Yourself (MAY), a tool integrated into Eclipse, supporting the description of species of agents and their transformation into executable agents implemented in Java