A Review of Agent-Based Programming for Multi-Agent Systems

Intelligent and autonomous agents is a subarea of symbolic artificial intelligence where these agents decide, either reactively or proactively, upon a course of action by reasoning about the information that is available about the world (including the environment, the agent itself, and other agents). It encompasses a multitude of techniques, such as negotiation protocols, agent simulation, multi-agent argumentation, multi-agent planning, and many others. In this paper, we focus on agent programming and we provide a systematic review of the literature in agent-based programming for multi-agent systems. In particular, we discuss both veteran (still maintained) and novel agent programming languages, their extensions, work on comparing some of these languages, and applications found in the literature that make use of agent programming.