FEATHERWEIGHT AGENT LANGUAGE - A Core Calculus for Agents and Artifacts

The widespread diffusion and availability of multicore architectures is going to make more and more aspects of concurrency and distribution to be part of mainstream programming and software engineering. The simpA framework is a recently proposed library-based extension of Java that introduces on top of the OO layer a new abstraction layer based on agent-oriented concepts. A simpA program is organized in terms of dynamic set of autonomous pro-active task-oriented entities -- the agents -- that cooperate by exploiting some artifacts, that represents resources and tools that are dynamically constructed, shared and co-used by agents. In this paper we promote the applicability of the agent and artifact metamodel in OO programming a step further. Namely, we propose a core calculus that integrates techniques coming from concurrency theory and from OO programming languages to provide a first basic formal framework for designing agent-oriented languages and studying properties of agent-oriented programs.