Maurizio Martelli Viviana Mascardi Floriano Zini
D.I.S.I. - Università di Genova
Via Dodecaneso 35, 16146 Genova, Italy
E-mail: {martelli,mascardi,zini}@disi.unige.it
Nowadays software applications are characterized by a great complexity. It arises from the need of reusing existing components and properly integrating them. The distribution of the involved entities and their heterogeneity makes it very useful the adoption of the agent-oriented technology. The paper presents the state-of-the-art of CaseLP, an experimental logic-based prototyping environment for multi-agent systems. CaseLP provides a prototyping method and a set of tools and languages which support the prototype realization. At the system specification level, an architectural description language can be adopted to describe the prototype in terms of agents classes, instances, their provided and required services and their communication links. At the agent specification level, a rule-based, not executable language can be used to easily define reactive and proactive agents. An executable, linear logic language can define more sophisticated agents and the system in which they operate. At the implementation level, new primitives are defined to extend the target prolog-like language. Finally, simulation tools are integrated within CaseLP to visualize the prototype execution and to collect statistics on it.
