Exception Handling in SARL as a Responsibility Distribution

Exception handling has been successfully proposed in software engineering practice as a simple, but effective, technology to address abnormal situations possibly occurring at runtime. Such mechanisms support the robust composition of heterogeneous software components, promoting code modularity, decoupling, and separation of concerns. Multi-agent systems bring these features to an extreme, but often lack systematic mechanisms for treating exceptions as part of their design. In this paper, we show how exception handling mechanism can be introduced in SARL, leveraging the abstractions that characterize its programming model. We introduce a new kind of space, supporting the responsibility distribution among agents concerning the handling of exceptional situations.