Affiliations: [a] Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy | [b] Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Federico Bergenti, Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy. Tel.: +39 0521 906929; Fax: +39 0521 906950; E-mail: federico.bergenti@unipr.it.
Abstract: This paper presents the key aspects of a proposed formalization of JADE agents and multi-agent systems based on transition systems. Such a formalization is meant to be useful to describe and clarify how JADE multi-agent systems work and to provide a theoretical instrument to validate and analyze the semantics of JADE agents. This is needed to decouple agent-oriented and object-oriented parts of an agent design and to avoid misunderstandings on the semantics of JADE agents. The chosen approach is to define a structural operational semantics for Java programs written using JADE, and the proposed formalization consists in two parts: the first identifies and defines the main entities that together compose a JADE multi-agent system; the second provides the transition system and rewriting rules. The paper terminates with two explanatory examples of the usage of the transition system. A brief recapitulation of the work concludes the paper.
