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AgenTalk: Describing Multiagent Coordination Protocols

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Japanese version is also available.

AgenTalk is a coordination protocol description language for multiagent systems. In the distributed artificial intelligence area, many coordination protocols such as the contract net protocol have been proposed, and many application-specific protocols will be required as more software agents start to be built. AgenTalk allows coordination protocols to be defined incrementally and to be easily customized to suit application domains by incorporating an inheritance mechanism. AgenTalk is being co-developed by NTT Communication Science Laboratories and Prof. Toru Ishida, Ishida Laboratory, Department of Information Science, Kyoto University.

What's new?

Mar 14, 1997: The distribution of the AgenTalk software has been restricted to Japan. The anonymous FTP service has stopped. People in Japan can download the software via http.
July 8, 1996: Version 1.1a4 (alpha version) released.
- Ported to MCL-PPC 3.9.
December 28, 1995: Version 1.1a3 (alpha version) released.
- The CALL-SUPER function is implemented to call the script-function defined in a super script.
December 27, 1995: Version 1.1a2 (alpha version) released.
- The incompatibility of AgenTalk.h with C++ is fixed.
December 15, 1995: Version 1.1a1 (alpha version) released.
- The CALL-SCRIPT function is implemented to allow subroutine-like usage of a script.
November 19, 1995: Version 1.1a0 (alpha version) released.
June 29, 1995: Version 1.0a5 (bug fix) released.
June 2, 1995: Version 1.0a4 released.

Software

The preliminary version of the software which implements the functionalities of AgenTalk is available in Japan. This software is written in Common Lisp and runs on Franz Inc. 's Allegro Common Lisp (ver. 4.2) (on Unix platforms) and Digitool, Inc. 's Macintosh Common Lisp (ver. 3.0p2 or later). To try out this software, please download the distribution package (about 330 kbytes).

The reference manual can be accessed through WWW.

Related Research

Socia: On Agent Network Socia, desktop conferencing support system was developed. AgenTalk is used to develop Socia.

Publications

Kuwabara, K., Ishida, T., and Osato, N.: "AgenTalk: Coordination Protocol Description for Multiagent Systems", Proc. First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS '95) p. 455 (1995)
Kuwabara, K., Ishida, T., and Osato, N.: "AgenTalk: Describing Multiagent Coordination Protocols with Inheritance", Proc. 7th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI '95) p.460-p.465 (1995)
Kuwabara, K.: "Meta-Level Control of Coordination Protocols", Proc. Second International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS '96) pp. 165-172 (1996)