Towards an Object Oriented Implementation of Belief-Goal-Role Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

One of the most driving forces behind multi-agent systems research and development is the Internet. Agents are populating the Internet at an increasingly rapid pace. Unfortunately, they are almost universally asocial. Accordingly, adequate agent concepts will be essential for agents in such open environment. To address this issue, we show in the first part of this paper that agents need to have communication concepts and organization concepts. We argue that instead of the usual approach of starting from a set of intentional states, the intentional structure should be deduced in terms of interaction. To this end, we come up with conceptualizations related to communication and organization. The second part of this paper deals with a study which compares the agent paradigm to the object paradigm. We also show the capabilities as well as the limits of the object paradigm to deal with the agent paradigm. We illustrate our work with the well known prey/predator game.