The LuCe coordination technology for MAS design and development on the Internet

Internet-based multi-agent systems call for new metaphors, abstractions, methodologies and enabling technologies specifically tailored to agent-oriented engineering. While coordination models define the framework to manage the space of agent interaction, ruling social behaviours and accomplishing social tasks, their impact on system design and development calls for an effective coordination technology. This paper presents LuCe, a coordination technology that integrates Java, Prolog and the notion of logic tuple centre, a programmable coordination medium, into a coherent framework. The power of the LuCe coordination technology is first discussed in general, then shown in the context of a simple yet significant system: a TicTacToe game among intelligent software agents and human players on the Internet.