Abstract
The need to modularise and thereby reuse complex agent programs has long been recognised in agent programming language research. Current approaches to agent modularity fall into two main categories: compositional; and environment-based. Motivated by a problem which requires two variants of the same agent to be built, this paper proposes a set of language extensions which add a complementary modularity style - reuse by inheritance - to agent programming languages. The extensions are designed so that they can be implemented in a preprocessor and added easily to an existing language, without affecting its type system, and with little or no change to its underlying interpreter.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Behrens, T., Hindriks, K., Bordini, R., Braubach, L., Dastani, M., Dix, J., Pokahr, J.: An Interface for Agent-Environment Interaction. In: The Eighth International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems ProMAS 2010, pp. 37–52 (2010)
Bordini, R., Hübner, J., Wooldridge, M.: Programming multi-agent systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. Wiley Interscience (2007)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W.: Extending the capability concept for flexible BDI agent modularization. Programming Multi-Agent Systems, 139–155 (2006)
Busetta, P., Howden, N., Rönnquist, R., Hodgson, A.: Structuring BDI agents in functional clusters. Intelligent Agents VI. Agent Theories Architectures, and Languages, 277–289 (2000)
Dahl, O., Myhrhaug, B., Nygaard, K.: Some features of the SIMULA 67 language. In: Proceedings of the Second Conference on Applications of Simulations, Winter Simulation Conference, pp. 29–31 (1968)
Daly, J., Brooks, A., Miller, J., Roper, M., Wood, M.: The effect of inheritance on the maintainability of object-oriented software: an empirical study. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, pp. 20–29. IEEE, Los Alamitos (1995)
Dastani, M., Mol, C., Steunebrink, B.: Modularity in agent programming languages. Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 139–152 (2008)
Frakes, W., Kang, K.: Software reuse research: Status and future. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 31(7), 529–536 (2005)
Madden, N., Logan, B.: Modularity and compositionality in Jason. In: Braubach, L., Briot, J.-P., Thangarajah, J. (eds.) ProMAS 2009. LNCS, vol. 5919, pp. 237–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Mohagheghi, P., Conradi, R., Killi, O., Schwarz, H.: An Empirical Study of Software Reuse vs. Defect-Density and Stability. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (2004)
Nilsson, N.: Teleo-reactive programs for agent control. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 158 (1994)
Novák, P., Dix, J.: Modular BDI architecture. In: Proceedings of The Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents And Multiagent Systems, pp. 1009–1015. ACM, New York (2006)
Rao, A.: AgentSpeak (L): BDI agents speak out in a logical computable language. Agents Breaking Away, 42–55 (1996)
Ricci, A., Piunti, M., Viroli, M.: Externalisation and Internalization: A New Perspective on Agent Modularisation in Multi-Agent System Programming. Languages, Methodologies, and Development Tools for Multi-Agent Systems, 35–54 (2010)
van Riemsdijk, M., Dastani, M., Meyer, J., de Boer, F.: Goal-oriented modularity in agent programming. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 1271–1278 (2006)
Russell, S., Jordan, H., O’Hare, G., Collier, R.: Agent Factory: A Framework for Prototyping Logic-Based AOP Languages. In: Proceedings of the Ninth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies, MATES 2011 (2011)
Snyder, A.: Encapsulation and inheritance in object-oriented programming languages. In: Conference Proceedings on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications, p. 45. ACM, New York (1986)
Svahnberg, M., Van Gurp, J., Bosch, J.: A taxonomy of variability realization techniques. Software: Practice and Experience 35(8), 705–754 (2005)
Tarr, P., Ossher, H., Harrison, W., Sutton Jr., S.: N degrees of separation: multi-dimensional separation of concerns. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 107–119. ACM, New York (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jordan, H.R., Russell, S.E., O’Hare, G.M.P., Collier, R.W. (2011). Reuse by Inheritance in Agent Programming Languages. In: Brazier, F.M.T., Nieuwenhuis, K., Pavlin, G., Warnier, M., Badica, C. (eds) Intelligent Distributed Computing V. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 382. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24013-3_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24013-3_30
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24012-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24013-3
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)