Towards a Flexible Development Framework for Multi-Agent Systems

In this paper, we present a software framework, called HDS (Heterogeneous Distributed System), that tries to simplify the realization of distributed applications and, in particular, of multi-agent systems, by: i) abstracting the use of different technologies for the realization of distributed applications on networks of heterogeneous devices connected through a set of different communication transport protocols, ii) merging the client-server and the peer-to-peer paradigms, and iii) implementing all the interactions among the processes of a system through the exchange of typed messages that allow the implementation of a large set of communication protocols and