Mehdi Dastani

2APL: a practical agent programming language

This article presents a BDI-based agent-oriented programming language, called 2APL (A Practical Agent Programming Language). This programming language facilitates the implementation of multi-agent systems consisting of individual agents that may share and access external environments. It realizes an effective integration of declarative and imperative style programming by introducing and integrating declarative beliefs and goals with events and plans. It also provides practical programming constructs to allow the generation, repair, and (different modes of) execution of plans based on beliefs, goals, and events. The formal syntax and semantics of the programming language are given and its relation with existing BDI-based agent-oriented programming languages is discussed.

The BOID architecture: conflicts between beliefs, obligations, intentions and desires

In this paper we introduce the so-called Beliefs-Obligations-Intentions-Desires or BOID architecture. It contains feedback loops to consider all effects of actions before committing to them, and mechanisms to resolve conflicts between the outputs of its four components. Agent types such as realistic or social agents correspond to specific types of conflict resolution embedded in the BOID archecture.

A Programming Language for Cognitive Agents: Goal-Directed 3APL

This paper presents the specification of a programming language for cognitive agents. This programming language is an extension of 3APL (An Abstract Agent Programming Language) and allows the programmer to implement agents’ mental attitudes like beliefs, goals, plans, and actions, and agents’ reasoning rules by means of which agents can modify their mental attitudes. The formal syntax and semantics of this language is presented as well as a discussion on the deliberation cycle and an example.

Multi-Agent Programming

ion keeping the agent abstraction level e.g. no agents sharing and calling OO objects effective programming models for controllable and observable computational entities Modularity away from the monolithic and centralised view Orthogonality wrt agent models, architectures, platforms support for heterogeneous systems

Programming Multi-Agent Systems in 3APL

This chapter presents 3APL, which is a multi-agent programming language, and its corresponding development platform. The 3APL language is motivated by cognitive agent architectures and provides programming constructs to implement individual agents directly in terms of beliefs, goals, plans, actions, and practical reasoning rules. The syntax and semantics of the 3APL programming language is explained. Various features of the language and platform and some software engineering issues are discussed.

Programming agent deliberation: an approach illustrated using the 3APL language

This paper presents the specification of a programming language for implementing the deliberation cycle of cognitive agents. The mental attitudes of cognitive agents are assumed to be represented in an object language. The implementation language for the deliberation cycle is considered as a meta-language the terms of which denote formulae from the object language. Without losing generality, we use the agent programming language 3APL as the object language. Using the meta-deliberation language, one can program the deliberation process of a cognitive agent. We discuss a set of programming constructs that can be used to program various aspects of the deliberation cycle including the planning constructs.

Normative Multi-agent Programs and Their Logics

Multi-agent systems are viewed as consisting of individual agents whose behaviors are regulated by an organization artefact. This paper presents a simplified version of a programming language that is designed to implement norm-based artefacts. Such artefacts are specified in terms of norms being enforced by monitoring, regimenting and sanctioning mechanisms. The syntax and operational semantics of the programming language are introduced and discussed. A logic is presented that can be used to specify and verify properties of programs developed in this language.

Computational Modeling of Emotion: Toward Improving the Inter- and Intradisciplinary Exchange

The past years have seen increasing cooperation between psychology and computer science in the field of computational modeling of emotion. However, to realize its potential, the exchange between the two disciplines, as well as the intradisciplinary coordination, should be further improved. We make three proposals for how this could be achieved. The proposals refer to: 1) systematizing and classifying the assumptions of psychological emotion theories; 2) formalizing emotion theories in implementation-independent formal languages (set theory, agent logics); and 3) modeling emotions using general cognitive architectures (such as Soar and ACT-R), general agent architectures (such as the BDI architecture) or general-purpose affective agent architectures. These proposals share two overarching themes. The first is a proposal for modularization: deconstruct emotion theories into basic assumptions; modularize architectures. The second is a proposal for unification and standardization: Translate different emotion theories into a common informal conceptual system or a formal language, or implement them in a common architecture.

Semantics of declarative goals in agent programming

This paper addresses the notion of declarative goals as used in agent programming. Declarative goals describe desirable states, and semantics of these goals in an agent programming context can be defined in various ways. This paper defines two semantics for goals, with one based on default logic. The semantics are partly motivated by an analysis of other proposals that have been done in the literature. Further, we establish relations between and properties of these semantics.

Goal types in agent programming

This paper discusses three types of declarative goals and motivates their integration in logic-based agent-oriented programming languages. These goal types are perform goals, achieve goals, and maintain goals. A goal type is considered as a specific agent attitude towards goals. The semantics for each goal type is explained from an operational perspective. It is argued that the suggested semantics of the goal types ensure some desirable and expected properties.