Welcome to the World of Interaction-Oriented Programming
Interaction-Oriented Programming (IOP) is an approach for building multiagent systems whose member agents represent autonomous, real-world principals. As the name suggests, it emphasizes, first and foremost, creating models that capture the interactions among the agents, and then implementing agents based on those models. So what are kinds of models? UML sequence diagrams? State machines? These and other traditional approaches are unsuited to multiagent settings. They are cumbersome to create and maintain and cannot support flexible interactions between agents.
June 14, 2026