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Environment programming in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) accounts for considering the computational environment where agents are situated as a first-class abstraction, to be suitably designed and programmed so as to improve MAS engineering.
This seminar discusses this idea, in particular by illustrating the computational and programming model provided by CArtAgO, which is a general-purpose platform/infrastructure for building shared computational worlds that agents, possibly belonging to heterogeneous agent platforms, can
exploit to work together inside the MAS.
CArtAgO is based on the A&A (Agents and Artifacts) meta-model, in which workspaces are modelled in terms of dynamic sets of artifacts. From the agent viewpoint, artifacts are first-class entities of agents? world, and represent resources and tools that agents can dynamically instantiate, share and use to support individual and collective activities. From the MAS designer viewpoint, artifacts are useful to uniformly design and program those abstractions inside a MAS that are not suitably modelled as agents, and that encapsulate functions to be exploited by individual agents or the
overall MAS?for instance mediating and empowering agent interaction and coordination,
or wrapping external resources.
In the seminar the Jason agent language & platform is used to program the agents working in the artifact-based environments.