Generalised object-oriented concepts for inter-agent communication

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a framework to program open societies of concurrently operating agents. The agents maintain a subjective theory about their environment and interact with each other via a communication mechanism suited for the exchange of information, which is a generalisation of the traditional rendez-vous communication mechanism from the object-oriented programming paradigm. Moreover, following object-oriented programming, agents are grouped into agent classes according to their particular characteristics; viz. the program that governs their behaviour, the language they employ to represent information and most interestingly the questions they can be asked to answer. We give and operational model of the programming language in terms of a transition system for the formal derivation of computations of multi-agent programs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.