ALICA - A Language Interactive Cooperative Agents

ALICA is a behaviour specification language for teams of agents. It provides modeling elements to describe team behaviours and strategies from a global perspective.

Cooperative behaviour of agents within highly dynamic and nondeterministic domains is an active field of research. In particular establishing highly responsive teamwork, where agents are able to react on dynamic changes in the environment while facing unreliable communication and sensory noise, is an open problem. Moreover, modelling such responsive, cooperative behaviour is difficult. ALICA is a novel model for cooperative behaviour geared towards highly dynamic domains. In this approach, agents estimate each other’s decision and correct these estimations once they receive contradictory information. We aim at a comprehensive approach for agent teamwork featuring intuitive modeling capabilities for multi-agent activities, abstractions over activities and agents, and a clear operational semantic for the new model.

ALICA and its corresponding software is available under the MIT License (if not stated otherwise) and can be downloaded from our GitHub profile.

The corresponding software components are separated into the following GitHub repositories:

• The ALICA Engine can be downloaded from the Alica Repository.
• The ALICA Engine depends on some of our general tools for file system interaction, configuration file reading, etc. The tools can be downloaded from the Supplementary Repository.
• In order to design ALICA Programs, you will need the Plan Designer from the Alica Plan Designer Repository.

ALICA was originally developed for the RoboCup Middle Size League. Meanwhile, it has approved its usability in various additional application domains.