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Realizing a multiagent system involves implementing member agents who interact based on a protocol while making decisions in a decentralized manner. Current programming models for agents offer poor abstractions for decision making and fail to adequately bridge an agent’s internal decision logic with its public decisions. We present Kiko, a protocol-based programming model for agents. To implement an agent, a programmer writes one or more decision makers, each of which chooses from among a set of valid decisions and makes mutually compatible decisions on what messages to send. By completely abstracting away the underlying communication service and by supporting practical decision-making patterns, Kiko enables agent developers to focus on business logic. We provide an operational semantics for Kiko and establish that Kiko agents are protocol compliant and able to realize any protocol enactment.
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This content will become publicly available on April 11, 2026
Orpheus: Engineering Multiagent Systems via Communicating Agents
We propose Orpheus, a novel programming model for communicating agents based on information protocols and realized using cognitive programming. Whereas traditional models are focused on reactions to handle incoming messages, Orpheus supports organizing the internal logic of an agent based on its goals. We give an operational semantics for Orpheus and implement this semantics in an adapter to help build agents. We use the adapter to demonstrate how Orpheus simplifies the programming of decentralized multiagent systems compared to the reactive programming model.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908374
- PAR ID:
- 10587512
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 39
- Issue:
- 22
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 23135 to 23143
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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