A fully integrated development environment for GOAL in Eclipse

Abstract

For the GOAL agent programming platform, a new, full-fledged IDE was created that provides support for all phases in the agent program development process, with the concepts of integration and adaptation at its base. Using the DLTK framework, a plug-in for the Eclipse platform was created in multiple iterations, continuously evaluating the usability during this process using SUS evaluations. Besides an editing framework, based on newly developed ANTLRv4 grammars, a fully integrated debugging environment was designed and developed. As agent programming languages are based on very different concepts than the more widely supported and documented programming languages like Java and C, this process was not straight-forward. The mapping of popular existing concepts and the creation of new AOP-specific standards has been documented in this work. Besides improving the development support for all different kinds of GOAL developers, this thesis aims to set a new standard in the field of multi-agent programming. Care has been taken to explain all steps in detail, and this work has been made as generally applicable within the multi-agent programming field as possible. Therefore, this thesis is also a full guide to the design and development of a mature and professional IDE for multi-agent programming. The full process of the creation of this IDE is presented in this thesis, with an evaluation of the state-of-the-art through literature and existing IDEs at its foundation. Additionally, a prototype was developed to increase the understanding of the requirements for such an environment.