AgenTalk: describing multiagent coordination protocols with inheritance

This paper presents the basic concepts behind AgenTalk, a language used for describing coordination protocols in multiagent systems. Many coordination protocols such as the contract net protocol have been proposed, and many application specific coordination protocols are expected to be required as soon as building of more software agents begins. Thus, a language for defining and implementing such coordination protocols plays a crucial role in the development of multiagent systems. By incorporating an inheritance mechanism, AgenTalk allows coordination protocols to be incrementally defined and easily customized to suit application domains. Its capability is demonstrated by describing the contract net and multistage negotiation protocols in AgenTalk using its inheritance mechanism.