A Functional Take on Multi-Agent Systems Position Paper

Due to the rising difficulty of developing complex systems a lot of research has gone into the multi‐agent paradigm over the past decades, during which a vast array of approaches for developing such systems have been proposed. Despite this fact there seems to be a gap in the MAS community between solutions that provide for expressivity and those that offer generality. It is our opinion that embedding the MAS language into a functional language we can have the best out of both worlds: we can implement the desired semantics in an abstract way, allowing us to focus on the problem domain, i.e. complex, distributed MAS. Our approach is going to be layered: (i) we start from a statically typed functional language and build an EDSL that acts as an executable specification language for single agent entities; and (ii) develop a framework for workflow‐oriented coordination on top of the previous layer and investigate its use as a means of implementing agent organizations, focusing on coordination and communication.