Complex software systems development require appropriate high-level features to better and easily tackle the new requirements in terms of interactions, concurrency and distribution. This requires a paradigm change in software engineering and corresponding programming languages. We are convinced that agent-oriented programming may be the support for this change by focusing on a small corpus of commonly accepted concepts and the corresponding programming language in line with the current developers' programming practices. This papers introduces SARL, a new general-purpose agent-oriented programming language undertaking this challenge. SARL comes with its full support in the Eclipse IDE for compilation and debugging, and a new version 2.0 of the Janus platform for execution purposes. The main perspective that guided the creation of SARL is the establishment of an open and easily extensible language. Our expectation is to provide the community with a common forum in terms of a first working testbed to study and compare various programming alternatives and associated metamodels.

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Abstract. Holonic Multi-Agent Systems (HMAS) are a convenient way to engineer complex and open systems. HMAS are based upon selfsimilar entities, called holons, which define an organizational structure called holarchy. An open issue of HMAS is to give holons means of selforganization to satisfy their goals. Our works focus on modeling and engineering of complex systems using a holonic organizational approach. This paper introduces the concept of capacity as the description of agents know-how. This concept allows the representation and reasoning about agents know-hows. Even more, it encourages a reusable modeling and provides agents with means to self-organize.

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