A Coordination Infrastructure for Agent-based Internet Applications

Internet applications are often structured as collections of interactive, heterogeneous agents, which have to coordinate to pursue the application goals. These applications require design methodologies that are far from being well established, and new standard technologies, models, languages, technologies and tools specifically tailored to the agent metaphor and to agent-based systems. This article presents LuCe, a coordination infrastructure for the design and the development of agent-based distributed applications on the Internet, which integrates Java, logic-based languages, and tuple-based coordination models. We discuss the impact of this approach on the design both of the single agents and of Internet applications, then suggest how it could be exploited in the design/development/test cycle.