A Survey of Agent-Oriented Programming: From Program Models to Programming Languages and Environments

Agent-oriented programming (AOP) adopts concepts and technologies of multi-agent system to develop software. It has gained great attentions in both academic and industry, and dozens of AOP languages have been proposed in the past almost two decades. However the current acceptance and practices of AOP do not convince that such paradigm has extensively exploited the technical advantages and potentials of multi-agent system to deal with the engineering issues for programming complex software. In this paper, we survey the AOP researches from three aspects: programming concepts and models, programming constructs and languages, programming tools and environments, which are indispensable as a programming paradigm in software engineering. We also analyze the weaknesses of current AOP researches from software engineering viewpoint and discuss future work.