Abstract
For AOP (Agent Oriented Programming) to become a mature discipline, lessons must be learned from practical language implementations. We present AF-APL (AgentFactory – Agent Programming Language) as an Agent Oriented Programming Language that has matured with continued revisions and implementations, resulting in a language – which, although based on the more theoretical aspects of AO design – has incorporated many of the practical considerations of programming real world agents. We describe AF-APL informally, focusing on its experience driven features, such as commitment reasoning, a rich plan operator set, and an inherent asynchronous design. We present the default execution cycle for the AF-APL interpreter, looking in detail at the Commitment Management model. This model provides an agent with power to reason about its own actions, while maintaining basic constraints on computational tractability. In our development of the language, we learned many lessons that are not covered in the purer AO language definitions. Before concluding, we discuss a number of these lessons.
As of the date of publication, the name of the language presented in this paper has changed from AF-APL to ALPHA (A Language for Programming Hybrid Agents). This change reflects our wish to highlight differences between this language and its ancestor, originally presented in [4]. This paper retains the name used during the submission and review process, but any subsequent publications and documentation shall use the name ‘ALPHA’.
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Ross, R., Collier, R., O’Hare, G.M.P. (2005). AF-APL – Bridging Principles and Practice in Agent Oriented Languages. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3346. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32260-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32260-3_4
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