INTEGRATING OBJECT-ORIENTED AND RULE-BASED PROGRAMMING FOR BUILDING AGENT SYSTEMS

Abstract

To facilitate the success of agent technology, we need suitable tools both to reduce the effort in the development of agent systems and to obtain efficient implementations of them. This paper presents an agent-oriented language for the development of multi-agent systems, called ALL (Agent Level Language), that should offer both the two features. In fact, on the one hand, ALL integrates object-oriented and rule based programming to simplify the definition of agent systems and the management of interactions between agents. On the other hand, ALL can be translated into C++, Common Lisp and Java code and can encapsulate objects written in these three languages allowing the reuse of a large amount of pre-existent software and the realization of efficient applications in a large set of (different) domains. ALL rules derive from YACC rules and can simplify the management of agents interaction because they are suitable for the parsing of messages and because they can be reused thanks to object-oriented inheritance.