Overview of a Formal Semantics for the JADEL Programming Language

This paper outlines a first proposal of a formal semantics for the JADEL programming language. JADEL is an agent-oriented programming language based on JADE that has been recently proposed to ease the adoption of JADE, and to promote its use. In previous works, JADEL was specified at the syntax level, and only an informal semantics was given. The major contribution of this paper is to outline a formalization of the semantics of JADEL to complement previous works and to allow reasoning on JADEL agents and multi-agent systems. First, the paper provides a brief recall on JADEL by describing its main abstractions and their specific syntactic constructs. Then, a discussion of the proposed operational semantics based on transition systems is described. Finally, a detailed operational semantics of only some relevant constructs is given. The validity of the proposed approach is discussed in the conclusion of the paper, together with directions of future developments.

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