YODA: Yet anOther agent Description lAnguage

Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) consist of a large number of entities, or agents, that cooperate and compete with each other to reach local and global goals. Agents operate immersed in an environment that can affect their behaviour. To design and predict the behaviour of MASs, it is crucial to use tools that allow not only to specify the behaviour of the single agent but allow to take into account the enclosing environment and its effect on the agents. In this paper, the framework YODA (Yet anOther agent Description lAnguage) is presented. The proposed specification language permits describing an agent in terms of the action it can perform and that are selected according to its state and a set of variables (sensors) that are observed from the environment. Action execution can change the agent state. The proposed language is also equipped with syntactic constructs that permits describing the enclosing environment and its evolution in time. At each step, the resulting model evolves as the consequence of the interaction among agents and the environment. In the paper, some case studies are used to show how our proposal works.