An object-oriented framework for building software agents

Abstract

Agent technology is a new approach of Distributed Artificial Intelligence to implement autonomous entities driven by beliefs, goals, capabilities and plans, and other agency properties such as adaptation, interaction, and mobility. Software agents are the focus of considerable research in the artificial intelligence community, but not much has been done in the field of software engineering. In this paper, we present an object-oriented framework for building software agents in a distributed environment. The design of the framework also allows an easy mapping of the models developed in the analysis and design phase of the Gaia Methodology to object-oriented code. We believe that object-oriented framework technology can reduce not only the development time but also the complexity of implementing multi-agent systems. We present an instantiated application that uses this framework to illustrate an implementation.