A Comprehensive Presentation of the Jadescript Agent-Oriented Programming Language

Jadescript is an agent-oriented programming language based on JADE that aims to become a dependable tool for the construction of industrial-strength multi-agent systems. This paper contributes to this objective by providing researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive description of Jadescript that discusses the most relevant features attained in several years of continuous development. In particular, this paper focuses on how Jadescript promotes the adoption of some ideas taken from agent-oriented programming by providing direct support for agent-oriented abstractions, like messages and ontologies, by encouraging the use of event-driven programming to govern interactions, and by allowing fine-grained task management using behaviours. Finally, to illustrate the practical applicability of Jadescript, this paper presents in detail the implementation of a well-known election algorithm traditionally used to coordinate distributed systems.