Interaction protocols in the JADEL programming language

This paper presents the support for interaction protocols that has been recently added to the JADEL programming language. JADEL is an agent-oriented programming language designed to ease the development of JADE agents and multi-agent systems by offering general-purpose agent-oriented abstractions to the programmer. The first part of the paper presents JADEL and motivates the need for a new agent-oriented programming language. Then, the agent-oriented abstractions that JADEL has been providing since its first version-namely agents, behaviours and communication ontologies-are described. The new support for interaction protocols is finally presented, and a simple example of a JADEL multi-agent system that uses interaction protocols is reported. The paper is concluded with an overview of the current state of JADEL and related tools.