Coordination Tools for MAS Development and Deployment

One of the most critical issues in the engineering of multi-agent systems (MAS) is the inadequacy of the available tools for MAS development and deployment. As we assume interaction as a first-class issue in MAS, tools are particularly required to monitor and debug inter-agents aspects, such as interaction protocols, coordination policies, social norms, and environment constraints. Since we claim that the definition of such tools is a basic research issue, in this paper we aim to identify the main requirements for development and deployment tools within an effective agent infrastructure. Focusing on agent interaction aspects, we take tuple-based coordination infrastructures--in particular the TuCSoN technology and tools--as our reference, and discuss the role of tools in a simple case study: the development and deployment of a well-known agent interaction protocol, the Contract Net.