=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=MERCURIO: An Interaction-oriented Framework for Designing, Verifying and Programming Multi-Agent Systems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-621/paper13.pdf
|volume=Vol-621
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/woa/BaldoniBBBMMMPPRRS10
}}
==MERCURIO: An Interaction-oriented Framework for Designing, Verifying and Programming Multi-Agent Systems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-621/paper13.pdf
MERCURIO: An Interaction-oriented Framework
for Designing, Verifying and Programming
Multi-Agent Systems (Position paper)
Matteo Baldoni∗ , Cristina Baroglio∗ , Federico Bergenti§ , Antonio Boccalatte‡ ,
Elisa Marengo∗ , Maurizio Martelli‡ , Viviana Mascardi‡ , Luca Padovani∗ ,
Viviana Patti∗ , Alessandro Ricci† , Gianfranco Rossi§ , and Andrea Santi†
∗ Università degli Studi di Torino
{baldoni,baroglio,emarengo,padovani,patti}@di.unito.it
† Università degli Studi di Bologna
{a.ricci,a.santi}@unibo.it
‡ Università degli Studi di Genova
{martelli,mascardi}@disi.unige.it, nino@dist.unige.it
§ Università degli Studi di Parma
{federico.bergenti,gianfranco.rossi}@unipr.it
Abstract—This is a position paper reporting the motivations, like the conformance of an agent specification (or of its run-
the starting point and the guidelines that characterise the time behavior) to a protocol. In open environments, in fact, it
MERCURIO1 project proposal, submitted to MIUR PRIN 20092 . is important to have guaranties on how interaction will take
The aim is to develop formal models of interactions and of
the related support infrastructures, that overcome the limits of place, coping with notions like responsibility and commitment.
the current approaches by explicitly representing not only the Unfortunately, current proposals of platforms and languages
agents but also the computational environment in terms of rules, for the development of MAS do not supply high level tools
conventions, resources, tools, and services that are functional to for directly implementing this kind of specifications. As a
the coordination and cooperation of the agents. The models will consequence, they do not support the necessary forms of
enable the verification of interaction properties of MAS from the
global point of view of the system as well as from the point of verification, with a negative impact on the applicability of
view of the single agents, due to the introduction of a novel social MAS to the realization of business-to-business and cross-
semantic of interaction based on commitments and on an explicit business systems.
account of the regulative rules. Let us consider, for instance, JADE [4], [18], [16], [17],
which is one of the best known infrastructures, sticking out
I. M OTIVATION
for its wide adoption also in business contexts. JADE agents
The growing pervasiveness of computer networks and of communicate by exchanging messages that conform to FIPA
Internet is an important catalyst pushing towards the real- ACL [3]. According to FIPA ACL mentalistic approach, the
ization of business-to-business and cross-business solutions. semantics of messages is given in terms of preconditions and
Interaction and coordination, central issues to any distributed effects on the mental states of the involved agents, which are
system, acquire in this context a special relevance since assumed to share a common ontology. Agent platforms based
they allow the involved groups to integrate by interacting on FIPA exclusively provide syntactic checks of message
according to the agreed contracts, to share best practices and structures, entrusting the semantics issues to agent developers.
agreements, to cooperatively exploit resources and to facilitate This hinders the applicability to open contexts, where it is
the identification and the development of new products. necessary to coordinate autonomous and heterogeneous agents
The issues of interaction, coordination and communication and it is not possible to assume mutual trust among them.
have been receiving great attention in the area of Multi-Agent In these contexts it is necessary to have an unambiguous
Systems (MAS). MAS are, therefore, the tools that could semantics allowing the verification of interaction properties
better meet these needs by offering the proper abstractions. before the interaction takes place [53] or during the interaction
Particularly relevant in the outlined application context are a [9], preserving at the same time the privacy of the implemented
shared and inspectable specification of the rules of the MAS policies.
and the verification of global properties of the interaction, like The mentalistic approach does not allow to satisfy all
the interoperability of the given roles, as well as properties these needs [41]; it is suitable for reasoning from the local
1 Italian name of Hermes, the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology. point of view of a single agent, but it does not allow the
2 Despite the label “2009”, it is the just closed call for Italian National verification of interaction properties of a MAS from a global
Projects, http://prin.miur.it/index.php?pag=2009. point of view. One of the reasons is that the reference model
lacks an abstraction for the representation, by means of a semantics is the only sufficiently general semantics to allow
public specification, of elements like (i) resources and services forms of interaction and of communication that do not rely
that are available in the environment/context in which agents solely on direct speech acts. As a consequence we will include
interact and (ii) the rules and protocols, defining the interaction models where communication is mediated by an environment,
of agents through the environment/context. All these elements that encapsulates and applies rules and constraints aimed at
belong to (and contribute to make) the environment of the coordinating agents at the organization level, and integrates
interacting agents. Such an abstraction, if available, would be ontological mediation functionalities. The environment will
the natural means for encapsulating resources, services, and provide the contract that agents should respect and a context
functionalities (like ontological mediators) that can support into which interpreting their actions. In this way, it will
the communication and the coordination of agents [68], [67], be possible to formally verify the desired properties of the
[44], thus facilitating the verification of the properties [13]. interaction, a priori and at execution time.
It could also facilitate the interaction of agents implemented
II. V ISION
in different languages because it would be sufficient that each
language implements the primitives for interacting with the The focus of our proposal is on the definition of formal
environment [1]. One of the consequences of the lack of an models of interactions and of the related support infrastruc-
explicit representation of the environment is that only forms tures, which explicitly represent not only the agents but also
of direct communication are possible. On the contrary, in the environment in terms of rules of interaction, conven-
the area of distributed systems and also in MAS alternative tions, resources, tools, and services that are functional to the
communication models, such as the generative communication coordination and cooperation of the agents. These models
based on tuple spaces [33], have been put forward. These must allow both direct and indirect forms of communication,
forms of communication, which do not necessarily require a include ontological mediators, and enable the verification of
space-time coupling between agents, are not supported. interaction properties of MAS from the global point of view
The issues that we mean to face have correspondences of the system as well as from the point of view of the single
with issues concerning normative MAS [71] and Artificial agents. The approach we plan to pursue in order to define a
Institutions [32], [66]. The current proposals in this field, formal model of interaction is based on a revision in social
however, do not supply all of the solutions that we need: either terms of the interaction and of the protocols controlling it,
they do not account for indirect forms of communication or along the lines of [14], [13], [12]. Furthermore, we will model
they lack mechanisms for allowing the a priori verification the environment, in the sense introduced by the A&A meta-
of global properties of the interaction. As [32], [66] witnes, model [44]. This will lead to the study of communication
there is, instead, an emerging need of defining a more abstract forms mediated by the environment. The resulting models will
notion of action, which is not limited to direct speech acts. be validated by the implementation of software tools and of
In this case, institutional actions are performed by executing programming languages featuring the designed abstractions.
instrumental actions that are conventionally associated with More in details, with reference to Fig. 1, the goals are:
them. Currently, instrumental actions are limited to speech 1) To introduce a formal model for specifying and con-
acts but this representation is not always natural. For instance, trolling the interaction. The model (top level of Fig. 1)
for voting in the human world, people often raise their hands must be equipped with an observational (commitment-
rather than saying the name corresponding to their choice. based) semantics and must be able to express not only
If the environment were represented explicitly it would be direct communicative acts but also interactions mediated
possible to use a wider range of instrumental actions, that can by the environment. This will enable forms of verifica-
be perceived by the other agents through the environment that tion that encompass both global interaction properties
acts as a medium. and specific agent properties such as interoperability
Our goal is, therefore, to propose an infrastructure that and conformance [11]. The approach does not hinder
overcomes such limits. The key of the proposal is the adoption agent autonomy, it guarantees the privacy of the policies
of a social approach to communication [46], [14], [13], [12], implemented by the agents, and consequently favors the
based on a model that includes an explicit representation not composition of heterogeneous agents. The model will be
only of agents but also of their environment, as a collection of inspired by the social approach introduced in [46] and
virtual and physical resources, tools and services, “artifacts” subsequently extended in [14], [13], [12].
as intended in the Agents & Artifacts (A&A) meta-model 2) To define high-level environment models supporting
[44], which are shared, used and adapted by the agents, the forms of interactions and coordination between
according to their goals. The introduction of environments agents outlined above. These models must support: inter-
is fundamental to the adoption of an observational (social) action protocols based on commitments; the definition of
semantics, like the one used in commitment protocols, in rules on the interaction; forms of mediated communica-
that it supplies primitives that allow agents to perceive and tion and coordination between agents (such as stigmergic
to modify the environment itself and, therefore, to interact coordination). They must also enable forms of a priori
and to coordinate with one another in a way that satisfies the and runtime verification of the interaction. To these aims,
rules of the environment. On the other hand, the observational we plan to use the A&A meta-model [59], [68], [44],
Fig. 1. The MERCURIO architecture.
[57] and the corresponding notion of programmable are able to guarantee. Another interesting application
environment [58] (programming abstractions level of regards the verification of adherence of bureaucratic
Fig. 1). procedures of public administration with respect to the
3) To integrate ontologies and ontological mediators in current normative. Specific case studies will be defined
the definition of the models so as to guarantee openness in collaboration with those companies that have stated
and heterogeneity of MAS. Mediation will occur at interest towards the project.
two distinct levels: the one related to the vocabulary
III. S TATE OF A RT
and domain of discourse and the one that characterizes
the social approach where it is required to bind the These novel elements, related to the formation of and
semantics of the agent actions with their meaning in the interaction within decentralized structures, find an initial
social terms. Ontological mediators will be realized as support in proposals from the literature in the area of MAS.
artifacts. Current proposals, however, are still incomplete in that they
4) To integrate the abstractions defined in the above supply solutions to single aspects. For instance, electronic
models within programming languages and frameworks. institutions [29], [10], [36], [35] regulate interaction, tackle
In particular, we plan to integrate the notions of agents, open environments and their semantics allows the verification
of environment, of direct and mediated communication, of properties but they only tackle direct communication pro-
and of ontological mediators. Possible starting points tocols, based on speech acts, and do not include an explicit
are the aforementioned FIPA ACL standard and the notion of environment. Commitment protocols [46], [70],
works that focus on the integration of agent-oriented effective in open systems and allowing more general forms
programming languages with environments [56]. The of communication, do not supply behavioral patterns, and for
JaCa platform [58], integrating Jason and CArtAgO, this reason it is impossible to verify properties of the inter-
will be taken as reference. This will form the execution action. Eventually, most of the models and architectures for
platform of Fig. 1 and will supply the primitives for environments prefigure simple/reactive agent models without
interacting with the environments. defining semantics, that are comparable to the ones for ACL,
5) To develop an open-source prototype of software and without explaining how such proposals could be integrated
infrastructure for the experimentation of the defined with direct communication models based on speech acts. We
models. The prototype will integrate and extend existing classify the relevant contributions in the literature according
technologies such as JADE [18], [16], [17] (as a FIPA- to the objectives and the methodological aspects that will be
compliant framework), CArtAgO [1] (for the program- examined in-depth along the project.
ming and the execution of environments), Jason (as a
A. Formal Models for Regulating the Interaction in MAS
programming language for BDI agents), MOISE [36]
(as organizational infrastructure). This topic has principally been tackled by modeling in-
6) To identify applicative scenarios for the evaluation of teraction protocols. Most of protocol representations refer
the developed models and prototypes. In this respect we to classic models, such as Petri nets, finite state machines,
regard the domain of Web services as particularly rele- process algebras, and aim at capturing the expected interaction
vant because of the need to deploy complex interactions flow. An advantage of this approach is that it supports the
having those characteristics of flexibility that agents verification of interaction properties [53], [21], [11], such
as: verifying the interoperability of the system and verifying
if certain modifications of a system preserve some desired main concepts used to define application environments, i.e.
properties (a crucial issue in open domains where agents can artifacts and workspaces, are first-class entities in the agents
enter/leave the system at any time). Singh and colleagues criti- world, and the interaction with agents is built around the agent-
cize the use of procedural specifications because too rigid [61], based concepts of action and perception (use and observation);
[25], [70]: agents cannot take advantage of opportunities that modularity and encapsulation, it provides an explicit way to
emerge along the interaction and that are not foreseen by their modularize the environment, where artifacts are components
procedure. Another issue is that communication languages use representing units of functionality, encapsulating a partially-
a BDI semantics (FIPA ACL is an example), where each agent observable state and operations; extensibility and adaptation,
has goals and beliefs of its own. At the system level, however, it provides a direct support for environment extensibility and
it is impossible to perform introspection of agents, which are, adaptation, since artifacts can be dynamically constructed
for this reason, black boxes. For what concerns the verification (instantiated), disposed, replaced, and adapted by agents;
of properties this approach allows agents to draw conclusions reusability, it promotes the definition of types of artifact that
about their own behavior but not to verify global properties of can be reused as tools in different application contexts, such
the system [41], [65]. as in the case of coordination artifacts empowering agent
Both problems are solved by commitment protocols [46], interaction and coordination, such as blackboards and synchro-
[61], which rely on an observational semantics of the interac- nizers. These features will be advantageous in the realization
tion and offer adequate flexibility to agents. Moreover, they do of the second goal of the project, w.r.t. approaches like [26],
not require the spatio-temporal coupling of agents (as instead where commitment stores, communication constraints and
direct communication does). Another advantage is that, though the interaction mechanisms reside in the middleware, which
remaining black boxes, agents agree on the meaning of the shields them from the agents. This has two disadvantages: the
social actions of the protocol. Since interactions are observable first is that even though all these elements are accounted for
and their semantics is shared, each agent should be able to in the high level specification, the lack of a corresponding
draw conclusions concerning the system as a whole. Unfortu- programming abstraction makes it difficult to verify whether
nately, besides some preliminary studies [62], the state of art the system corresponds to the specification; the second is a
does not contain proposals on how performing the verifications lack of flexibility, in that it is not possible for the agents to
in a MAS, ruled by this kind of protocols. A relevant feature dynamically change the rules of interaction or to adopt kinds
seems to be the introduction, within commitment protocols, of communication that are not already implemented in the
of behavioral rules which constrain the possible evolutions of middleware.
the social state [13], [12]. In the state of the art numerous applications of the endoge-
nous environments, i.e. environments used as a computational
B. Environment Models support for the agents’ activities, have been explored, in-
The notion of environment has always played a key role in cluding coordination artifacts [45], artifacts used for realizing
the context of MAS; recently, it started to be considered as a argumentation by means of proper coordination mechanisms
first-class abstraction useful for the design and the engineering [43], artifacts used for realizing stigmergic coordination mech-
of MAS [68]. A&A [44] follows this perspective, being anisms [55], [49], organizational artifacts [35], [50], [51].
a meta-model rooted upon Activity Theory and Computer Even if CArtAgO can be considered a framework sufficiently
Support Cooperative Work that defines the main abstractions mature for the concrete developing of software/computational
for modeling a MAS, and in particular for modeling the MAS environments it can not be considered “complete” yet.
environment in which a MAS is situated. A&A promotes Indeed at this moment the state of the art and in particular
a vision of an endogenous environment, that is a sort of the CArtAgO framework are still lacking: (i) a reference
software/computational environment, part of the MAS, that standard on the environment side comparable to the existing
encapsulates the set of tools and resources useful/required by standards in the context of the agents direct communications
agents during the execution of their activities. A&A introduces (FIPA ACL), (ii) the definition of a rigorous and formal
the notion of artifact as the fundamental abstraction used for semantics, in particular related to the artifact abstraction, (iii)
modeling the resources and the tools that populates the MAS an integration with the current communication approaches
environment. The introduction of the environment as a new (FIPA ACL, KQML, etc.), and finally (iv) the support of
first-class abstraction requires new engineering approaches for semantic models and ontologies.
programming the MAS environment. The CArtAgO frame-
work [58] has been devised precisely for copying this new C. Multi-agent Organizations and Institutions
necessity. It provides the basis for the engineering of MAS The possibility of controlling and specifying interactions
environments on the base of: (i) a proper computational is relevant also for areas like the organizational theory [40],
model and (ii) a programming model for the design and [71], [15], [36] and electronic institutions [29], [10] areas.
the development of the environments on the base of the Tendentiously, the focus is orthogonal to the one posed on
A&A meta-model. In particular, it provides those features interaction protocols, in that it concerns the modeling of the
that are important from a software engineering point of view: structure rather than of the interaction.
abstraction, it preserves the agent abstraction level, since the The abstract architecture of e-Institutions (e.g. Ameli [29]),
places a middleware composed of governors and staff agents systematic way the services that an OA should provide for
between participating agents and an agent communication ensuring semantic interoperability in an open MAS, it has
infrastructure (e.g. JADE [18], [16], [17]). The notion of many limitations. The main one is the assumption that each
environment is dialogical: it is not something agents can sense ontology integrated in the MAS adheres to the OKBC model
and act upon but a conceptual one that agents, playing within [6]. Currently, in fact, the most widely accepted ontology
the institution, can interact with by means of norms and laws, language is OWL [7] which is quite different from OKBC and
based on specific ontologies, social structures, and language cannot be converted to it in an easy and automatic way. Also,
conventions. Agents communicate with each other by means agents are allowed to specify only one ontology as reference
of speech acts and, behind the scene, the middleware mediates vocabulary for a given message, which is a strong limitation
such communication. The extension proposed for situated e- since an agent might use terms from different ontologies in
Institutions [10] introduces the notion of “World of Interest” the same message, and hence it might want to refer to more
to model the environment, that is external to the MAS but than one ontology at the same time.
which is relevant to the MAS application. The infrastructure Maybe due to these limitations, there have been really
of the e-Institution, in this case, mediates also the interaction few attempts to design and implement OAs. The first dates
of the agents in the MAS with the view of the environment back to 2001 [63] and realizes an OA for the COMTEC
that it supplies. Further along this line, but in the context of platform that implements a subset of the services of a generic
organizations, ORA4MAS [35] proposes the use of artifacts to FIPA-compliant OA. In 2007 [47] integrated an OA into
enable the access of the agents in the MAS to the organization, AgentService, a FIPA compliant framework based on .NET
providing a working environment that agents can perceive, [64]. Ontologies in AgentService are represented in OKBC,
act upon and adapt. Following the A&A perspective, they are and hence the implementation of their OA is fully compliant
concrete bricks used to structure the agents’ world: part of this with the FIPA specification, although the offered services
world is represented by the organizational infrastructure, part are a subset of the possible ones. The only two attempts of
by artifacts introduced by specific MAS applications, including integrating a FIPA-compliant OA into JADE, we are aware
entities/services belonging to the external environment. of, are [42], and [24]. Both follow the FIPA specification but
According to [10] there are, however, two significant differ- adapt it to ontologies represented in OWL. The first proposal
ences among artifacts and e-Institutions: (i) e-Institutions are is aimed at storing and modifying OWL ontologies: the OA
tailored to a particular, though large, family of applications agent exploits the Jena library [37] to this aim. The second
while artifacts are more generic; (ii) e-Institutions are a well proposal, instead, faces the problem of “answering queries
established and proven technology that includes a formal foun- about relationships between terms or between ontologies”. The
dation, and advanced engineering and tool support, while for solution proposed by the authors exploits ontology matching
artifacts, these features are still in a preliminary phase. One of techniques [30]. Apart from [24], no other existing proposal
the aims of MERCURIO is to give to artifacts both the formal faces that problem. Among non FIPA-compliant solutions, we
foundation (in terms of commitments and interaction patterns) mention [38], which focuses on the process of mapping and
and the engineering tools that they are still missing. The in- integrating ontologies in a MAS thanks to a set of agents
troduction of interaction patterns with an observational nature, which collaborate together, and the proposal in [48], which
allowing the verification of global properties, that we aim at implements the OA as a web service, in order to offer its
studying, will allow the realization of e-Institutions by means services also over the Internet.
of artifacts. The artifact will contain all the features necessary As far as semantic mediation at the social approach level
for monitoring the on-going interactions and for detecting is concerned, we are aware of no proposals in the literature.
violations. A second step will be to consider organizations In order to take the context of count-as rules into account, we
and realize them again by means of artifacts. To this aim, it plan to face this research issue by exploiting context aware
is possible to exploit open source systems like CArtAgO [1], semantic matching techniques, that extend and improve those
for the programming and the execution of environments, and described in [39].
MOISE [36], as organizational infrastructure.
E. Software Infrastructures for Agents
D. Semantic Mediation in MAS The tools currently available to agent developers fail in
The problem of semantic mediation at the vocabulary and supporting both semantic interoperability and goal-directed
domain of discourse levels was faced for the first time by reasoning. Nowadays, the development of agents and multi-
the “Ontology Service Specification” [8] issued by FIPA in agent systems is based on two kinds of tools: agent platforms
2001. According to that specification, an “Ontology Agent” and BDI (or variations) development environments. Agent
(OA, for short) should be integrated in the MAS in order platforms, such as JADE [18], [16], [17] and FIPA-OS [2] pro-
to provide services such as translating expressions between vide only a transport layer and some basic services, but they do
different ontologies and/or different content languages and not provide any support for goal-directed behavior. Moreover,
answering queries about relationships between terms or be- they lack support for semantic interoperability because they
tween ontologies. Although the FIPA Ontology Service Spec- do not take into account the semantics of the ACL they adopt.
ification represents the first and only attempt to analyze in a The available BDI development environments, such as Jadex
[23] and 2APL [28], support only syntactic interoperability intelligent agents, and consequently the reasoning techniques
because they do not exploit their reasoning engines to integrate that such agents may adopt to take advantage of these envi-
the semantics of the adopted ACL. ronments. First steps in this direction, with respect to agents
The research on Agent Communication Languages (ACL) with BDI architectures, have been described in [52], [49].
is constantly headed towards semantic interoperability [34] The MERCURIO project aims at putting forward an ex-
because the most common ACLs, e.g., KQML [31] and FIPA tension proposal for the FIPA ACL standard, where the FIPA
ACL [3], provide each message with a declarative semantics ACL-based communication is integrated with forms of interac-
that was explicitly designed to support goal-directed reasoning. tions, that are enabled and mediated by the environment. This
Unfortunately, the research on ACLs only marginally inves- will lead to an explicit representation of environments as first-
tigated the decoupling properties of this kind of languages class entities (in particular endogenous environments based
(see, e.g., [19], [20]). To support the practical development on artifacts) and of the related model of actions/perceptions.
of software agents, several programming languages have thus Furthermore we will formulate an improved version of the
been introduced to incorporate some of the concepts from MAS programming language/framework JaCa, where we plan
agent logics. Some languages use actions as their starting point to integrate the agent-oriented programming language Jason,
to define commitments (Agent-0, [60]), intentions (AgentS- which is based on a BDI architecture, with the CArtAgO
peak(L), [54]) and goals (3APL, [27]). computational framework. This result will extend the work
done so far in this direction [56], [58].
IV. E XPECTED R ESULTS
In MERCURIO we will implement a prototype of the
The achievements expected from this research are of dif- reference infrastructural model defined by the project. The
ferent natures: scientific result that will advance the state of prototype will be based on the development and integration
the art, software products deriving from the development of of existing open-source technologies including JADE [4], the
implementations, and upshots in applicative settings. reference FIPA platform, CArtAgO [1], the reference platform
The formal model developed in MERCURIO will extend and technology for the programming and execution of envi-
commitment protocols by introducing behavioral rules. The ronments, and agent-oriented programming languages such as
starting point will be the work done in [14], [13], [12]. This Jason [5] and 2APL [28]. The software platform will include
will advance the current state of the art with respect to the implementations of the “context sensitive” ontology alignment
specification of commitment protocols and also with respect algorithms developed in MERCURIO. The algorithms will be
to the verification of interaction properties (like interoperabil- evaluated against standard benchmarks and also against the
ity and conformance), for which there currently exist only case studies devised in MERCURIO.
preliminary proposals [62]. Another advancement concerns Aside from the effects on research contexts, we think that
the declarative specification of protocols and their usage by the project may give significant contributions also to industrial
designers and software engineers. The proposals coming from applicative contexts, in particular to those companies working
MERCURIO conjugate the flexibility and openness features on software development in large, distributed systems and
that are typical of MAS with the needs of modularity and in service-oriented architectures. Among the most interest-
compositionality that are typical of design and development ing examples are the integration and the cooperation of e-
methodologies. The adoption of commitment protocols makes Government applications (services) spread over the nation. For
it easier and more natural to represent (inter)actions that are this reason, MERCURIO will involve some companies in the
not limited to communicative acts but that include interactions project, and in particular in the definition of realistic case stud-
mediated by the environment, namely actions upon the envi- ies against which the project’s products will be validated. As
ronment and the detection of variations of the environment regards (Web) services, some fundamental aspects promoted
ruled by “contracts”. by the SOA model, such as autonomy and decoupling, are
For what concerns the coordination infrastructure, a first addressed in a natural way by the agent-oriented paradigm.
result will be the definition of environments based on the A&A Development and analysis of service-oriented systems can
meta-model and on the CArtAgO computational framework, benefit from the increased level of abstraction offered by
that implement the formal models and the interaction proto- agents, by reducing the gap between the modeling, design,
cols mentioned above. A large number of the environments, development, and implementation phases.
described in the literature supporting communication and coor-
dination, have been stated considering purely reactive architec- R EFERENCES
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