Agent Communication Language Research Articles

Hohfeld in cyberspace and other applications of normative reasoning in agent technology

Two areas of importance for agents and multiagent systems are investigated: design of agent programming languages, and design of agent communication languages. The paper contributes in the above mentioned areas by demonstrating improved or novel applications for deontic logic and normative reasoning. Examples are taken from computer-supported cooperative work, and electronic commerce.

Decentralised Workflows and Software Agents

This paper argues that the combination of software agents with existing workflow management systems can facilitate the degree of co-ordination and collaboration required to make virtual enterprises a reality. It describes the use of software agents in the setting-up of decentralised workflows, the reactive and proactive redistribution of work during process failures, the promotion of interoperability between workflow management systems, and the visualisation and monitoring of decentralised business processes. An implementation is described which uses a number of industry standard components, such as the agent communication language defined by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Java™ and the Process Interchange Format.

Concurrency and knowledge-level communication in agent languages

In this paper we try to answer the following questions: Is it possible to program solely at the level of an agent communication language? And if this is the case, what requirements and conditions need to be taken into account? We argue that, although a number of languages defining abstract communication primitives have been proposed in the past few years, knowledge-level programming can only be supported if a number of careful assumptions about the communication primitives and the underlying architecture are made, including asynchronous communication mechanisms, reliable message passing, and nonblocking primitives. To achieve a more rigorous understanding of these issues we proceed in a formal way. First, we postulate a set of requirements that an agent communication language should satisfy to be regarded as knowledge level. Then, we define a weak agent communication language, and we show that a synchronous version of the language does not satisfy requirements for knowledge-level programming. Finally, we show how an alternative asynchronous version of the language can be defined, which avoids the aforementioned problems. To prove these results, we introduce a general framework for reasoning on communication and concurrency aspects in the context of agent communication languages.

Agent communication languages: rethinking the principles

Agent communication languages have been used for years in proprietary multiagent systems. Yet agents from different vendors-or even different research projects-cannot communicate with each other. The author looks at the underlying reasons and proposes a conceptual shift from individual agent representations to social interaction.

AN AGENT BASED LANGUAGE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

This paper presents a concurrent object-oriented language, called CUBL, that seems be suitable for the development and maintenance of multi-agent systems. This language is based on objects, called c_units, that act in parallel and communicate with each other through synchronous and asynchronous message passing, and allows the distribution of a program, that is, of its objects on a network of UNIX workstations. This language has been enriched with an agent architecture that offers some of more important features for agent-oriented programming and some advantages as regards the other implemented agent architectures. In particular this architecture allows the development of systems where agents communicate with each other through a high level agent communication language and can change their behavior during their life.

The Federation Architecture for Interoperable Agent-based Concurrent Engineering Systems

This paper presents an approach to the development of concurrent engineering software applications based on a knowledge sharing technology. In this approach, individual programmers write their programs in the form of separate modules called software agents, which interoperate with their peers using an expressive communication standard called Agent Communication Language. The runtime activities of the individual software agents are coordinated by task-independent programs called facilitators. Facilitators perform a wide variety of tasks, including the automated selection of agents to accomplish subtasks, the mediation of terminology, the buffering of partial knowledge in communication between agents, and the management of communication with other facilitators on other machines. Once set in operation, software agents interoperate to accomplish the overall task in a heterogeneous distributed architecture called federation. The paper discusses the major aspects of this approach and briefly describes three concurrent engineering applications developed in light of this approach.

Agent-based framework for integrated facility engineering

An agent-based framework for the development of integrated facility engineering environments in support of collaborative design is introduced. This framework aims at integrating design software by allowing better software interoperability. Within their framework, design agents represent various existing design and planning systems that communicate their design information and knowledge partially and incrementally using the Agent Communication Language (ACL). ACL is a formal language proposed as a communication standard for disparate software. It is based on a logic-based language called Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) and a message protocol called Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML). Design agents are linked and their communication of design information is coordinated via system programs called facilitators in a federation architecture. The federation architecture specifies the way design agents and facilitators communicate in an integrated software environment. In concert with pursuing fundamental research concepts, we have been developing an integrated design software environment that spans different phases of the facility life cycle. This environment serves to demonstrate the primary aspects of this research methodology. In this paper, we first discuss the integration problem and review related research projects. We then present the major aspects of agent-based software engineering methodology and its application to integrated facility engineering. A highlight of the current integrated design environment development is given to illustrate the advantages of this approach. Finally, we summarize and discuss some of the important research issues in light of previous research.