How to Do Things With Words

From computer games to human societies, many natural and artificial phenomena can be represented as multi-agent systems. Over time, these systems have been proven a really powerful tool for modelling and understanding phenomena in fields, such as economics and trading, health care, urban planning and social sciences. However, although, intelligent agents have been around for years, their actual implementation is still in its early stages. Since the late nineties many agent platforms have been developed. Some of them have already been abandoned whereas others continue releasing new versions. On the other hand, the agent-oriented research community is still providing more and more new platforms. This vast amount of platform options leads to a high degree of heterogeneity. Hence, a common problem is how people interested in using multi-agent systems should choose which platform to use in order to benefit from agent technology. This decision was usually left to word of mouth, past experiences or platform publicity, lately however people depend on solid survey articles. To date, in most cases multi-agent system surveys describe only the basic characteristics of a few representatives without even providing any classification of the systems themselves. This article presents a comparative up-to-date review of the most promising existing agent platforms that can be used. It is based on universal comparison and evaluation criteria, proposing classifications for helping readers to understand which agent platforms broadly exhibit similar properties and in which situations which choices should be made.

A Survey of Agent Platforms

In this paper, we propose the conjunction of the Smart City Initiative and the concept of Industry 4.0. The term smart city has been a phenomenon of the last years, which is very inflected especially since 2008 when the world was hit by the financial crisis. The main reasons for the emergence of the Smart City Initiative are to create a sustainable model for cities and preserve quality of life of their citizens. The topic of the smart city cannot be seen only as a technical discipline, but different economic, humanitarian or legal aspects must be involved as well. In the concept of Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things (IoT) shall be used for the development of so-called smart products. Sub-components of the product are equipped with their own intelligence. Added intelligence is used both during the manufacturing of a product as well as during subsequent handling, up to continuous monitoring of the product lifecycle (smart processes). Other important aspects of the Industry 4.0 are Internet of Services (IoS), which includes especially intelligent transport and logistics (smart mobility, smart logistics), as well as Internet of Energy (IoE), which determines how the natural resources are used in proper way (electricity, water, oil, etc.). IoT, IoS, IoP and IoE can be considered as an element that can create a connection of the Smart City Initiative and Industry 4.0 — Industry 4.0 can be seen as a part of smart cities. Interconnection of these systems can be expected to change — transport processes from design logistic processes through to their online optimization with respect to the chosen objective function and the latest information from the transport infrastructure. Linking information from process-based Industry 4.0 with intelligent transport systems of the smart city could create very effective, demand-oriented and higher productivity of manufacturing enterprises as well as sustainable development of society.

Industry 4.0 as a part of smart cities

Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications

The number of distributed energy components and devices continues to increase globally. As a result, distributed control schemes are desirable for managing and utilizing these devices, together wit...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/22348972.2017.1348890

Multi-agent systems and their applications

Recent years have seen the emergence of a number of AOP languages. While these can mostly be characterized as logic-oriented languages that map situations to courses of action, they are based on a variety of concepts, resulting in obvious differences in syntax and semantics. Less obviously, the development tools and infrastructure - such as environment integration, reuse mechanisms, debugging, and IDE integration - surrounding these languages also vary widely. Two drawbacks of this diversity are: a perceived lack of transferability of knowledge and expertise between languages; and a potential obscuring of the fundamental conceptual differences between languages. These drawbacks can impact on both the languages' uptake and comparability.

In this paper, we present a Common Language Framework that has emerged out of ongoing work on AOP languages that have been deployed through Agent Factory. This framework consists of a set of pre-written components for building agent interpreters, together with a set of tools that can be easily adapted to different AOP languages. Through this framework we have been able to rapidly prototype a range of different AOP languages, one of which is presented as a case study in this paper.

/pdf/agent-factory-a-framework-for-prototyping-logic-based-aop-4qnpsrn9r0.pdf

Agent factory: a framework for prototyping logic-based AOP languages

Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) researchers have successfully developed a range of agent programming languages that bridge the gap between theory and practice. Unfortunately, despite the in-community success of these languages, they have proven less compelling to the wider software engineering community. One of the main problems facing AOP language developers is the need to bridge the cognitive gap that exists between the concepts underpinning mainstream languages and those underpinning AOP. In this paper, we attempt to build such a bridge through a conceptual mapping that we subsequently use to drive the design of a new programming language entitled ASTRA, which has been evaluated by a group of experienced software engineers attending an Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Masters course.

/pdf/reflecting-on-agent-programming-with-agentspeak-l-1kd4lvu9o7.pdf

Reflecting on Agent Programming with AgentSpeak(L)

Real-time monitoring and validation of waste transportation using intelligent agents and pattern recognition

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.

Reuse by Inheritance in Agent Programming Languages

Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) researchers have successfully developed a range of agent programming languages that bridge the gap between theory and practice. Unfortunately, despite the in-community success of these languages, they have proven less compelling to the wider software engineering community. One of the main problems facing AOP language developers is the need to bridge the cognitive gap that exists between the concepts underpinning mainstream languages and those underpinning AOP. In this paper, we attempt to build such a bridge through a conceptual mapping between Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and the AgentSpeak(L) family of AOP languages. This mapping explores how OOP concepts and the concurrent programming concept of threads relate to AgentSpeak(L) concepts. We then use our analysis of this mapping to drive the design of a new programming language entitled ASTRA.

/pdf/exploring-aop-from-an-oop-perspective-25oxixvnc8.pdf

Sean Russell

Papers

Agent factory: a framework for prototyping logic-based AOP languages

Reflecting on Agent Programming with AgentSpeak(L)

Real-time monitoring and validation of waste transportation using intelligent agents and pattern recognition

Reuse by Inheritance in Agent Programming Languages

Exploring AOP from an OOP perspective