Modular BDI architecture

Abstract

One of the main challenges in agent-oriented programming is the design of specialized programming languages for single agent development. They should provide transparent interfaces to existing mainstream programming languages for easy integration with external code and legacy software. The underlying architecture of such programming languages has to be robust enough to support various approaches to knowledge representation and agent reasoning models. In this paper we propose a modular BDI agent programming architecture, which is independent of the internal structure of its components and agent reasoning model. The connections between the components of such a BDI system are provided by interaction rules. Using this separation, we are able to draw a clear distinction between knowledge representation issues of a BDI agent system components and its dynamics. Copyright 2006 ACM.