LuCe: A Tuple-based Coordination Infrastructure for Prolog and Java Agents

The engineering of an application as a multi-agent system (MAS henceforth) calls for models, languages, and tools specifically tailored to the metaphors of agent and agent society. In these systems, agents are typically required to interact and interoperate, yet this is not enough to guarantee that the MAS operates towards the accomplishments of its global goals: what is needed is the ability of constraining interaction so as to ensure that the social rules of the MAS, intended as an agent society, are respected and enforced. This is what coordination is for. In order to provide standard metaphors and abstractions to build agent societies, coordination should be one of the basic services supplied by an effective infrastructure for MAS design, development and run-time support. LuCe is a coordination infrastructure providing MAS engineers with tuple-based coordination technology for both Prolog and Java agents. Based on logic tuple centres, LuCe enables the definition of (reusable) intelligent coordination components, and effectively supports the MAS construction process by model-specific tools, which bring the model metaphors to action.