MetateM: The Story so Far

METATEM is a simple programming language based on the direct execution of temporal logic statements. It was introduced through a number of papers [35,2,3] culminating in a book collecting together work on the basic temporal language [5]. However, since that time, there has been a programme of research, carried out over a number of years, extending, adapting and applying the basic approach. In particular, much of the research has concerned the development of descendents of METATEM for describing and implementing complex multi-agent systems. Thus, while there are a number of other approaches to executing temporal statements [32,18], we will concentrate on this one particular approach and will describe the developments over the last 15 years. The structure of this article mirrors the research developments in that the path through these developments is not linear. The diagram below gives a pictorial explanation of the sections that follow.