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Programming BDI Agents with Pure Java

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Multiagent System Technologies (MATES 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8732))

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Abstract

BDI represents a well-known agent architecture that has been successfully adopted for expressing agent behavior in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions. A core advantage of the architecture consists in its underlying philosophical model that relies on intuitive folk-psychological notions to describe rational human behavior. A key challenge consists in making the ideas of the BDI model easily accessible for software engineers. For this purpose many different BDI programming languages have been devised that differ considerably in their interpretation of the attitudes and the used programming paradigm. In many cases, novel agent languages such as AgentSpeak(L) have been developed which expose a new syntax and semantics to the user. On the one hand this is positive because it allows for introducing a compact and concise notation, but on the other hand the language is very different from well-known and adopted mainstream languages. To remedy this problem it will be shown that the BDI model can also be realized in a completely object oriented programming language by exploiting its metadata capabilities. We will show how the BDI attitudes can be mapped to slightly enhanced object oriented counterparts and how common BDI use cases can be realized using the novel approach. A key advantage of the approach is that BDI programming more closely resembles object orientation and the learning effort is reduced, because existing concepts and tool chains can be further employed. The usefulness of the approach will be illustrated with an example application from the area of production automation.

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Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Haubeck, C., Ladiges, J. (2014). Programming BDI Agents with Pure Java. In: Müller, J.P., Weyrich, M., Bazzan, A.L.C. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies. MATES 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8732. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11584-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11584-9_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11583-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11584-9

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