JaKtA: Closing the Tooling Gap for Mainstream BDI
Abstract
Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent-oriented programming is a well-established paradigm for developing autonomous agents, yet its adoption in mainstream software engineering remains limited—partly due to a lack of accessible tooling that integrates well with widely adopted programming languages and development practices.
This chapter presents JaKtA (Jason-like Kotlin Agents), a BDI agent-oriented programming framework designed as a Kotlin internal DSL. JaKtA brings BDI programming to the JVM ecosystem, enabling developers to define agents using familiar Kotlin idioms while benefiting from the full power of the language’s type system, tooling, and ecosystem. The chapter discusses the design rationale, architecture, and capabilities of JaKtA, and shows how it addresses the gap between theoretical BDI models and practical, maintainable multi-agent system development.