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Improving the Design and Modularity of BDI Agents with Capability Relationships

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Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8758))

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Abstract

The belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture has been proposed to support the development of rational agents, integrating theoretical foundations of BDI agents, their implementation, and the building of large-scale multi-agent applications. However, the BDI architecture, as initially proposed, does not provide adequate concepts to produce intra-agent modular software components. The capability concept emerged to address this issue, but the relationships among capabilities have been insufficiently explored to support the development of BDI agents. We thus, in this paper, propose the use of three different types of relationships between capabilities in BDI agent development — namely association, composition and generalisation — which are widely used in object-oriented software development, and are fundamental to develop software components with low coupling and high cohesion. Our goal with this paper is to promote the exploitation of these and other mechanisms to develop large-scale modular multi-agent systems and discussion about this important issue of agent-oriented software engineering.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Ingrid Nunes

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  1. Ingrid Nunes
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, De Uithof, 3584 CC, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Fabiano Dalpiaz

  2. Department of Informatics, Clausthal University of Technology, Julius-Albert-Str. 4, 38678,, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Jürgen Dix

  3. Department of Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. Birna van Riemsdijk

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Nunes, I. (2014). Improving the Design and Modularity of BDI Agents with Capability Relationships. In: Dalpiaz, F., Dix, J., van Riemsdijk, M.B. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8758. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14484-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14484-9_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14483-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14484-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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