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2025 Volume 40
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

Exception handling in multi-agent oriented programming

  • Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Torino, Italy

  • Università della Valle d’Aosta – Université de la Vallée d’Aoste, Aosta, Italy

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  • Abstract: Exception handling has been successfully proposed in the past years as a simple yet powerful software engineering tool to promote modularity and decoupling, while also preserving robustness. Multi-agent systems (MAS) and organizations (MAOs), in turn, offer powerful abstractions to build distributed systems; current models and methodologies, however, fall short in addressing exception handling in a systematic way, not considering exceptions as part of their design. Thus, the problem is usually approached by ad hoc solutions that hamper code modularization and decoupling. In this work, we outline a vision of how exception handling in MAS can be granted by design. We present an extension of the organizational model and infrastructure adopted in JaCaMo, that explicitly encompasses the notion of exception as a first-class element in the design of an organization. Relying on such a model, we propose an exception handling mechanism that is seamlessly integrated with organizational concepts, such as responsibilities, goals, and norms. In an organization, besides responsibilities for organizational goals, we propose to specify also responsibilities for managing exceptions, that is, for providing feedback about the context in which exceptions occur, and for handling it.
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  • Cite this article

    Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Roberto Micalizio, Stefano Tedeschi. 2025. Exception handling in multi-agent oriented programming. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000050
    Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Roberto Micalizio, Stefano Tedeschi. 2025. Exception handling in multi-agent oriented programming. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000050
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

Exception handling in multi-agent oriented programming

  • Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Torino, Italy

  • Università della Valle d’Aosta – Université de la Vallée d’Aoste, Aosta, Italy

  • Received: 21 December 2023
  • Revised: 10 April 2025
  • Accepted: 10 April 2025
  • Published online: 29 May 2025
The Knowledge Engineering Review  40,  2025, 40(1)  |  Cite this article

Abstract: Abstract: Exception handling has been successfully proposed in the past years as a simple yet powerful software engineering tool to promote modularity and decoupling, while also preserving robustness. Multi-agent systems (MAS) and organizations (MAOs), in turn, offer powerful abstractions to build distributed systems; current models and methodologies, however, fall short in addressing exception handling in a systematic way, not considering exceptions as part of their design. Thus, the problem is usually approached by ad hoc solutions that hamper code modularization and decoupling. In this work, we outline a vision of how exception handling in MAS can be granted by design. We present an extension of the organizational model and infrastructure adopted in JaCaMo, that explicitly encompasses the notion of exception as a first-class element in the design of an organization. Relying on such a model, we propose an exception handling mechanism that is seamlessly integrated with organizational concepts, such as responsibilities, goals, and norms. In an organization, besides responsibilities for organizational goals, we propose to specify also responsibilities for managing exceptions, that is, for providing feedback about the context in which exceptions occur, and for handling it.

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    Acknowledgments

    • The work of Cristina Baroglio and Stefano Tedeschi is part of the project NODES which has received funding from the MUR—M4C2 1.5 of PNRR funded by the European Union—NextGenerationEU (Grant agreement no. ECS00000036).

    • The full code of JaCaMo extended with exception handling, together with some examples, is available in the official Moise repository, in a dedicated branch: https://github.com/moise-lang/moise. We are currently working on integrating the extension into the official JaCaMo release.

    • Note that Moise has the following goal types: achievement, performance, maintenance. Please, refer to Moise official documentation for further details.

    Rights and permissions
    • This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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    Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Roberto Micalizio, Stefano Tedeschi. 2025. Exception handling in multi-agent oriented programming. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000050
    Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Roberto Micalizio, Stefano Tedeschi. 2025. Exception handling in multi-agent oriented programming. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000050
    shu

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