Seminar Report ’03 Agent Oriented Programming

INTRODUCTION

We need open architectures that continuously change and evolve

to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. More and
more software must operate on different platforms, without recompilation
and with minimal assumptions about its operating systems and users. It
must be robust, autonomous and proactive. These circumstances
motivated the development of Agent Oriented Programming.

The objective of Agent Oriented (AO) Technology is to build

systems applicable to real world that can observe and act on changes in
the environment. Such systems must be able to behave rationally and
autonomously in completion of their designated tasks. AO technology is an
approach for building complex real time distributed applications. This
technology is build on belief that a computer system must be designed to
exhibit rational goal directed behaviour similar to that of a human being. AO
technology achieves this by building entities called agents which are
purposeful reactive and communication based and sometimes team
oriented.

There are different programming methods. Object Oriented

Programming is the successor of Structured programming. Agent oriented
programming can be seen as an improvement and extension of object
oriented programming. Since the word “Programming” is attached it means
that both concepts are close to the programming language and
implementation level. The term “Agent-Oriented Programming” was
introduced by Shoham. So this AOP is a fairly new programming
paradigm that supports societal view of computation. In AOP objects
known as agents interact to achieve individual goals. Agents can be
autonomous entities, deciding their next step without the interference of a
user, or they can be controllable, serving as mediatory between user and

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another agent.In AOP programming is performed at abstract level. Agent-
Oriented Software Engineering is being described as a new paradigm for
the research field of Software Engineering. But in order to become a new
paradigm for the software industry, robust and easy-to-use methodologies
and tools have to be developed. The term AOP was suggested by
Shoham.

1. ESSENTIALS OF AN AOP

Shoham suggests that AOP system needs each of three

elements to be complete

1. A formal language with clear syntax for describing the mental state.
This would likely include structure for stating beliefs, passing messages etc.
2. A programming language in which to define agents. The semantics of
this language should be closely related to formal language.
3. A method for converting neutral applications into agents. This kind of
tool will allow an agent to communicate with a non-agent .

2. AGENT

Before we go in detail into the programming side of AOP lets

have a look into what the agent concept is?
Agent is a software process that meets the conventions of OAA
(Open Agent Architecture) society. An agent is an abstraction that enables
to model a system more easily. With this paradigm, a complex system can
be modeled as a set of entities, the“agents”. Agent satisfies this
requirement by registering the services it can provide in an acceptable form
by being able to speak the Inter agent Communication language (IACL),
and by sharing the functionality common to all OAA Agent such as the
ability to install triggers, manage data in certain ways etc. An agent

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Seminar Report ’03 Agent Oriented Programming
according to Shoham is “an entity whose state is viewed as consisting of
mental components such as beliefs, capabilities, choices and
commitments”. This definition is cryptic at best and useless at worst. In
agent Oriented programming there is no single agreed definition of entities
that are dealt with it.

“What makes any hardware or software component an agent is

precisely the fact that one has chosen to analyze and control it in these
mental terms.” – Yoav Shoham

Generally agent is a hardware or (more usually) software based

computer system with the following properties

*Autonomy: The ability to operate without direct intervention of humans or

others and have some kind of control over their actions and internal state.
*Social-ability: The ability to interact with other agents through some kind of
agent-communication language.
*Reactivity: The ability to understand the environment and respond
regularly to changes that occur in it. Environment is usually thought to be
physical, unpredictable, and containing other agents
*Pro-activeness: The ability to exhibit goal-directed behaviour by taking the
initiative instead of just acting in response. An agent is pro-active because
it acts according to a goal and not simply in reaction to the environment. It
is capable of behaviors (directed by the objective to carry out) taking the
initiative rather than to wait for orders stating to it what it must do.

Some other attributes of agency are

*Mobility: The ability to move around an electronic network.
*Veracity: The assumption of not communicating false information
knowingly.
*Benevolence: The assumption of not having conflicting goals.

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*Rationality: The assumption of acting with a view to achieve its goals,
instead of preventing them.

So we can say that an agent is an intelligent agent; i.e. it is a

piece of autonomous software. Is there any special meaning in words
intelligent and agent? An agent shows intelligent behaviour, which is the
ability to select actions based on knowledge. The word agent means one
who is authorized to act for or in place of another.

Examples of software agents

1. The animated paper clip in Microsoft office.
2. Computer viruses (example of destructive agent)
3. Artificial players or actors in computer games and simulation.
4. Web spiders:- Collect data to build indexes to used by a software
engine.

So the agent needs to have

Belief: This represents the agents current knowledge about the world,
including information about the current state of the environment inferred
from perception devices and messages from other agents, as well as
internal information.

Desire: This represents a state, which the agent is trying to achieve, such
as safe landing of all planes currently circling the airport, or the
achievement of a certain financial return on the stock market.

Intention: This is the chosen means to achieve the agents desires and is
generally implemented as plans. Plan may be thought of as procedures
that come with preconditions and intended outcomes.

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Plan: The means of achieving desires with the options available to the
agents.

In agent systems the agent not only needs to know what has to
be achieved , but also needs to be able to take appropriate action inorder
to ensure that the desired state of the world is achieved .So an agent
system requires not just abductive reasoning, but also a suitable notion of
agent.

3. AGENT CLASSIFICATION

So far we discussed about what an agent is. Now we may go to

the different types of agents. The presence and absence of the above
mentioned attributes is the basis of classification. There is weak and strong
notion of agency. Agent theories depend on these two notions of agency.
In the weak notion of agency, agents have their own will (autonomy), they
are able to interact with each other (social ability), they respond to stimulus
(reactivity) and they take initiative (pro-activity). Weak notion requires only
a white box on agents. It defines agents only in terms of observable
properties. In strong notion of agency weak notion of agency is preserved,
in addition agents can move around (mobility), they are truthful (veracity),
they do what they are told to do (benevolence) and they will perform in an
optimal manner to achieve goals (rationality). i.e. in strong notion of agency
agent is modeled in terms of mental concepts. These mental concepts
should have an implicit representation within the implementation of agents.
This strong notion forces a white box on agents. . In McCarthy’s view,
ascribing mental qualities is a means of understanding and of
communication between humans, i.e. it is a purely conceptual tool that
serves the purpose of expressing existing knowledge about a particular
program or its current state.

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Shall we go detail into the idea of mental concepts

"All the ... reasons for ascribing belief's are epistemological; i.e.
ascribing beliefs is needed to adapt to limitations on our ability to acquire
knowledge, use it for prediction, and establish generalizations in terms of
the elementary structure of the program. Perhaps this is the general reason
for ascribing higher levels of organization to systems."

To illustrate why this point of view is reasonable, McCarthy uses

the example of a program that is given in source code form. It is possible to
completely determine the programs behavior by simulating the given code,
i.e. no mental categories are necessary to describe this behavior.

Why would we still want to use mental categories to talk and reason about
the program?
In the original paper, McCarthy discusses several reasons for
this. In the following list, I have selected those reasons that seem to be
most relevant to me.

(1) The programs state at a particular point in time is usually not

directly observable. Therefore, the observable information is better
expressed in mental categories.
(2) A complete simulation may be too slow, but a prediction about the
behavior on the basis of the ascribed mental qualities may be feasible.
Ascribing mental qualities can lead to more general hypothesis about the
programs behavior than a finite number of simulations.
(3) The mental categories (e.g. goals) that are ascribed are likely to
correspond to the programmers intentions when designing the program.
Thus, the program can be understood and changed more easily. The
structure of the program is more easily accessible then in the source code
form.

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(4) Especially the fourth point in the above enumeration is extremely
important for AOSE because the task of understanding existing software
becomes increasingly important in the software industry and is likely to
outrange the development of new software. Thus, if it becomes easier to
access the original developers idea (that is eventually manifested in the
design) it becomes easier to understand the design and this leads to higher
cost efficiency in software maintenance.

Through this tour we are also getting introduced into Agent-0

based languages.
3.1. Describing Mental State

Here I will clearly define some of the psychological terms we have

been using and lay out the semantics behind the coming languages. Some
of the terms we need to solidify are decisions, which are partially
determined by beliefs, That in turn relate to the state of the world and the
capabilities of the agent. The Agent-0 based languages adopt a specific
form of decisions that remove some functionality but simplify the problem of
language definition. Rather than have an agent decide to perform an action
as some function of its beliefs and the state of the world, Shoham
introduces the notion of commitments and defines a decision to be a
commitment to oneself to perform an action. The task of the language
designer is now simplified in a number of ways:

No new mechanism need be introduced to perform action

selection. With commitments, the agent can assume that it magically
attains some obligations represented as beliefs that it will perform an
action. For example, the Moon-Rover might posses a belief that it will turn
left at time t. The actual language specification must have a mechanism for
deciding when to adopt these commitments; this is in some sense an
action selection mechanism.

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Seminar Report ’03 Agent Oriented Programming
• Designing a large system becomes a challenge. With a dynamic
action-selection mechanism, decisions can be made according to some
(possibly) pre-specified rules. With a commitment system, the rules must be
specified when the program is created and must cover a tremendous
amount of possible scenarios.

The three key categories of Shoham's formal language are :

Belief
Sentences in the formal language are point-based time
statements; they describe the state of something in the world at a particular
point in time. For example,
turn(me, left)t

would mean that I will turn / have turned left at time t. Note that this is not
only a statement but an action. This introduces the limitation that actions
are viewed as "instantaneous".

To express that I currently believe that I will turn left at time t, we would
write : B*now*me turn(me, left)t

With this formalism, it is possible to express ideas such as existential

belief.

Obligation (Commitment) and Decision

An obligation is introduced as the belief that one agent will create

the truth of a statement (for another agent) at a point in time. In other
words,
OBLtme,you turn(me, left)t+1
means that at time t, I am obligated to you to turn left at time t+1. Note that
the statement need not be an action; I could have just as easily entered
into the following commitment :

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OBLtme,you on_pedestal(you)t+1
which means that I am obligated to, somehow, make it true that you are on
a pedestal at time t+1.
Again, a decision is simply expressed as an obligation to oneself.
Capability

An agent is said to be capable of a statement if it has the ability to

see that that statement hold at the specified time. For example,
CAN*now*me on_pedestal(you)t
means that I am currently capable of seeing to it that you are on a pedestal
at time t. Note that this does not assure that, when the time comes, I am
still capable of this. An agent must be able to handle the possibility that its
capabilities may have changed since it entered into a commitment.
There are four key properties that should hold in any reasonable agent
language -- they are required for reasonable performance of the programs
written in the language. They are :

1.Internal Consistency
Any agent written in the language should have consistent beliefs and
desires. For example, to believe x and believe not(x) simultaneously would
violate this constraint. A mechanism is needed for arbitration should these
situations arise.

2.Good Faith
An agent should not commit to a statement unless it believes it is capable
of the statement.

3.Introspection
Agents must be aware of their obligations :
OBL ta,bstatement -> Bta OBL ta,bstatement
not(OBL ta,bstatement) -> Bta not(OBL ta,bstatement)

4.Persistence of Mental State

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Seminar Report ’03 Agent Oriented Programming
AOP requires that beliefs and obligations should persist by default. In other
words, what an agent believes at time t it should believe at time t+1 unless
some external force has affected its perspective.

Finally, capabilities are assumed to be fairly consistent; this is the

result of fairly dependent action-selection and the awkward definition of
decisions. If the things that an agent were capable of fluctuated wildly, its
entering into commitments would be meaningless. It would not be capable
of fulfilling its commitments.

4. LANGUAGES

We need to have a brief look into the agent oriented languages

.lets have look into the agent-0 language.

4.1 Agent-0

This is one of the languages that can be used for agent oriented
programming.Agent-0, like all of its counterparts surveyed here, follows a
simple control loop when executing a program.
at each time step

1) Gather incoming messages and update the mental state accordingly

2) Execute commitments (using capabilities)

The cycle of control of an Agent-0 program is shown in Figure 1.

Observe that, while it might aid the author to think of an Agent-0 program
as a logic program, it is not one. Nothing like proposition matching is
involved; simply straight-forward command execution.

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A program in Agent-0 is made up of rules for entering

commitment, rules for executing capabilities and a set of initial beliefs. In
Agent-0, commitments can be made only to execute primitive actions; any
activity that would require planning must be committed to as the anticipated
elements of its plan. For example, the Rover could not commit to 'go-to-
MAP-POINT(x)' unless that was a primitive action. More likely, it would
have to commit to the series of 'left-turn', 'right-turn', 'go-forward' actions
that would bring it to point x. Note that this is part of the reason for the rigid
nature of actions; if for some reason an activity failed, the agent would

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have no recourse to find a new plan or drop the goal. Beginning with the
most elementary details, the syntax of an Agent-0 program is as follows :

Statements

Statements of fact are the foundation of the concept of AOP.

Facts in Agent-0, for reasons of implementation complexity, are simple
atomic sentences; no conjunction or disjunction operators are included.
Some sample statements : (t (rock west 65)) (which could mean that it is
true at time t that there is a rock 65 meters west) and (NOT (t (empty
gasTank))) (it is Not true at time t that the gas tank is empty). Of course the
interpretation of the sentences is left to the programmer; the intentional
point-of-view suggests that these sentences only have meaning from the
results they generate.

Unconditional Action Statements

Agents can engage in any of two classes of actions: private and

communicative. Private actions are handled by a separate entity
(something other than the AOP interpreter) when they are encountered. No
mechanism is in place in Agent-0 for private actions to do anything but
notify the user that they are to be executed. For example, the turn-right
private action of the Rover would do nothing but perhaps print turn-right
with the current Agent-0 specification. It is not difficult to imagine a
mechanism for sending messages to other (say, Java) programs telling
them to execute these primitives. Shoham, however, does not address this
deficiency and may have other plans for it.

The syntax of a private-action execution statement is :

(DO t p-action)
where p-action is the private action to execute.

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Communicative actions use the speech-act commands to converse with
other agents. The four classes of messages in Agent-0 are :
(INFORM t a fact)
(REQUEST t a action)
(UNREQUEST t a action)
(REFRAIN action)
where t specifies the time the message is to take place, a is the agent that
receive the message, and action is any action statement. An INFORM
action sends the fact to agent a, a REQUEST notifies agent a that the
requester would like the action to be realized. An UNREQUEST is the
inverse of a REQUEST. A REFRAIN message asks that an action not be
committed to by the receiving agent.

Conditional Action Statements

Conditional actions are actions that are initiated only if some keys
of the mental state hold. The syntax for specifying a conditional action is :
(IF mntlcond action)
where the action is executed only if the mental condition is true. Mental
conditions are queries of the belief of a statement or whether an action is
committed to. Conditions, therefore, take the form (B fact) (true if the agent
believes the fact) or ((CMT a) action) (true if the agent is committed to
agent a to perform the action). Mental conditions may be connected
conjunctively or disjunctively using the AND and OR operators. For
example :
(AND (B x) (B y) (NOT ((CMT a) z)))
is true if the agent believes x and y but is not committed to agent a to
perform z.

Variables

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Agent-0 has limited support for variables. Existentially qualified
variables (?x) and universally qualified variables (?!x) are supported. The
scope of a bound variable is the entire formula in which they are
instantiated.

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Commitment Rules

As was stated earlier, an Agent-0 program is basically a collection

of commitment rules. The agent simply reacts to its environment; bases its
actions on what are called message and mental conditions. Mental
conditions were discussed earlier. A message condition is matched if the
agent just received a message of the specified type. The format of a
message condition is (From Type Content) where From is an agent name,
Type is a message type (REQUEST, etc), and Content matches the actual
message. For example,
(?x REQUEST ?y)
matches every request from every agent.
The syntax for a complete commitment rule is :
(COMMIT msgcond mntlcond (agent action))
which commits the agent to perform action for agent in the future.

Capabilities

Capabilities are stored in a database as (private-action mntlcond)

pairs. The mental conditions allow the system to dispose of commitments
to execute capabilities that would not behave properly due to a change in
the state of the world. What should be done in this case is not immediately
clear; Agent-0 simply discards any commitments that cannot be executed
without even notifying the agent responsible for requesting the action take
place.

So what makes an agent do anything anyway? No agent would

ever commit to anything unless asked to by another agent. In actuality, an
agent can be written to hold commitments initially and build on those; for
example the Rover might be designed to drive around chaotically until it
found something interesting (when mental conditions would spawn other

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Seminar Report ’03 Agent Oriented Programming
commitments). This is not unlike the concept of Event-Driven programming,
where behavior is defined in relation to external occurrences.

5. Comparison of OOP and AOP

An early computational theory that was meant as the foundation

of a "natural" way of programming is declarative programming but it has
been demonstrated by empirical investigations in cognitive psychology that
this claim does not necessarily hold true.

(1)Agent-oriented programming (AOP) can be seen as an

extension of object-oriented programming (OOP), OOP on the other hand
can be seen as a successor of structured programming. (2)In OOP the
main entity is the object. An object is a logical combination of data
structures and their corresponding methods (functions). An object can be
anything ranging from a concrete entity from the real world to a conceptual
entity that only exists in the designers head. Each object within the system
is associated with a particular class that determines the objects basic
properties. Classes can be linked with each other in several ways.
Probably the best known relation between two classes is inheritance that
models a conceptual extension of a common base specification. During
their lifetime, objects communicate by sending messages to each other.
These messages can be used to request services from the receiving object
such as to provide internal information or to change the current state.(3)
Objects are successfully being used as abstractions for passive entities
(e.g. a house) in the real-world, and agents are regarded as a possible
successor of objects since they can improve the abstractions of active
entities. (4)Agents are similar to objects, but they also support structures
for representing mental components, i.e. beliefs and commitments. (5)In
addition, agents support high-level interaction (using agent-communication
languages) between agents based on the ``speech act'' theory as opposed

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to ad-hoc messages frequently used between objects, examples of such
languages are ACL and KQML.

(6)The property of autonomy of an agent is a major difference

between the two paradigms. An object is passive by nature and is activated
on reception of a message (typically reception of an invocation of one of its
methods). It does not encapsulate any capacity of choice of actions. The
agent, as for it, has a role to play within the system, which justifies that it
can be brought to carryout actions for it, even if it is already in direct
relation with other agents. It is always active. This amounts by the
henceforth famous sentence: “The objects do it for free; the agents do it
because they want to”. Thus the traditional view of an object is the one of a
passive entity that acts only on demand. However, this idea of passivity of
the object is called into question with the introduction of the active object
concept . Therefore the question arises: “is an active object an agent?”. It is
true that the concepts get closer, if one disregards pro-activeness and
interpretation of the characteristics of autonomy, social ability and
reactivity.

(7)Another important difference between AOP and OOP is that

objects are controlled from the outside (whitebox control), as opposed to
agents that have autonomous behavior which can't be directly controllable
from the outside (blackbox control). In other words, agents have the right to
say ``no''.

In summary, the collection of object-oriented concepts is clear

and manageable in size and does not vary greatly in different object-
oriented approaches. In the agent-oriented universe, on the other hand, we
are faced with the first serious problem as there is no single agreed
definition of the entities that are dealt with. Earlier we have mentioned
about the various notions of agency.

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An object is a logical combination of data structures

and their corresponding methods (functions). Moreover agents support
high level interaction between agents based on speech act theory as
opposed to ad-hoc messages frequently used between objects.

(9)The main point is that OOP has nothing to say about who has
access to the methods of an object apart from in terms of setting a global
private/public distinction. In AO programming the designer should be forced
to think in terms of a messaging interface between agents, such that any
accessing of a method subject to security constraints. An AO language
would try to pressure developers into providing higher level interfaces, and
thus move the locus of control away from the method being accessed, and
towards making the entity a self contained entity that checks who is making
the request before acting upon it. This whole approach is supposed to be
suited to environments where lots of different people from different
organizations have built the components, rather than where one might
have lots of different objects built by a group of people that we assume is
trying to co-operate.

These concepts correspond to the agent-oriented world by

replacing class with role, state variable with belief/knowledge and method
with message. Thus a role definition describes the agent's capabilities, the
data that is needed to produce the desired results and the requests that
trigger a particular service. Besides this fundamental relation, there are
many other conceptual similarities between object-orientation and agent-
orientation that can be mapped onto each other as summarized in the
following table.

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OOP AOP
Structural
Elements
abstract class generic role
Class domain specific role
member variable Knowledge, belief
Method Capability
Relations
collaboration
Negotiation
(uses)
composition (has) holonic agents
inheritance (is) role multiplicity
domain specific role + individual
instantiation
knowledge
polymorphism service matchmaking

(10)In an object-oriented runtime system, the objects are

statically represented by the object architecture. This architecture is usually
quite simple as it only contains the current state of the object and the
relation to the objects class (which determines the operations that can be
performed on the object). An object is usually represented as arbitrary
collection of data elements with associated functions and the granularity of
objects is potentially not limited. However, efficiency issues dictate that not
every entity is modeled as an object and so in reality this conceptual
benefit is slightly weakened. The object management system is responsible
for representing the relations such as inheritance between the defined
classes and object manipulation such as creating or destroying objects.
Furthermore, the object management system is also responsible for
dynamic aspects such as method selection of polymorphous objects,
exception handling or garbage collection.

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In an agent-oriented runtime system, things are distinctly more
complicated although similar in their general structure. The basic entities
are the agents that are implemented by their agent architecture. However,
agent architectures are far more complex then the object architecture,
especially because of the dynamic aspects that must be dealt with.
Because of the richness of the agent-oriented world, there exists a large
number of different agent architectures. Due to the vast number of
approaches, it is impossible to identify the best or most general
architecture. In each iteration, the agent perceives the state of its
environment, integrates the perception in its knowledge base that is used
to derive the next action which is then executed. This generic cycle is a
useful abstraction as it provides a black-box view on the agent architecture
and encapsulates specific aspects.

So we can reach the following conclusions about difference

between AOP And OOP that The name agent oriented programming was
chosen to stress the view of an entity that sends the processes
messages-this is the name agent-oriented programming was chosen to
stress the view of an agent as an entity that sends and processes
messages -- this is the definition of an object in Hewitt's Actors framework.
An agent differs from the objects that we know from C++ or Java in a
number of significant ways :
• The fields of an agent are restricted. The state of an agent is
described in terms of beliefs, capabilities, and decisions. These ideas are
built into the syntax of the language.
• Each message is also defined in terms of mental activities. An agent
may engage another (or itself) with messaging activities from a restricted
class of categories. In Shoham's formalism, the categories of messages are
taken from speech-act theory; they are: informing, requesting, offering,
accepting, rejecting, competing, and assisting.

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I do not believe that it benefits the researcher to think of agents in
the framework of OOP. While an agent may be an object in the strictest
sense, many ideas considered fundamental to the theory of objects are
missing from AOP.
So in shoham’s words
“AOP can be viewed as an specialization of object-oriented programming.”
-- Shoham

5.1. Can agents solve all software problems?

Since this is a new and rapidly growing filed, there is a danger

that researchers become overly optimistic regarding the abilities of agent-
oriented software engineering. Wooldridge and Jennings discuss the
potential pitfalls of agent-oriented software engineering. They have
classified pitfalls in five groups: political, conceptual, analysis and design,
agent-level, and society-level pitfalls. Political pitfalls can occur if the
concept of agents is oversold or sought applied as a the universal solution.
Conceptual pitfalls may occur if the developer forgets that agents are
software, in fact multithreaded software. Analysis and design pitfalls may
occur if the developer ignores related technology, e.g. other software
engineering methodologies. Agent-level pitfalls may occur if the developer
tries to use too much or too little artificial intelligence in the agent-system.
And finally, society-level pitfalls can occur if the developer sees agents
everywhere or applies too few agents in the agent-system

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6. METHODOLOGIES

Several approaches to agent-oriented software engineering have

been developed, ranging from structured, informal methodologies, to formal
ones, as described in a recent overview and in most of them focusing
basically on architectural design. We propose a software development
methodology, called Tropos, which will allow us to exploit all the flexibility
provided by agent oriented programming. In a nutshell, the three key
features of Tropos are the following:

1. The notion of agent and all the related mentalistic notions are used in all
phases of software development, from the first phases of early analysis
down to the actual implementation.
2. A crucial role is given to the earlier analysis of requirements that
precedes prescriptive requirements specification. We consider therefore
much earlier phases with respect to standard object oriented methodologies
as, for instance, those based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) ,
where use case analysis is proposed as an early activity, followed by
architectural design.
3. The methodology rests on the idea of building a model of the system-to-
be that is incrementally refined and extended from a conceptual level to
executable artifacts. This process adopts a transformational approach: a set
of transformation operators which allow the engineer to progressively detail
the higher level notions introduced in the earlier phases are proposed. It
must be noticed that, contrarily to what happens in most other approaches,
e.g., UML based methodologies, there is no change of graphical notation
from one step to the next (e.g., from use cases to class diagrams).
The refinement process is performed in a more uniform way.
In the following section we give an overview of the Tropos methodology,

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6.1. The Tropos Methodology

The Tropos methodology is intended to support all the analysis and design
activities from the very early phases of requirements engineering down to
implementation, and organizes them into five main development phases:
early requirement analysis, late requirements analysis, architectural design,
detailed design and implementation2.The Tropos modeling language is
derived from the Eric Yu’s _* paradigm [18] which offers actors, goals, and
actor dependencies as primitive concepts for modeling an application
during early requirements analysis

Tropos language is intended to support both an formal model

specification and a formal one, allowing for automatic checking of model
properties . A set of diagrammatic representation of the model are
provided. Each element in the model has its own graphical representation,
taken from the* framework. Two main types of diagrams are provided for
visualizing the model: the actor diagram3, where the nodes (the actors) are
connected through dependencies (labeled arcs ), and the goal diagram4,
represented as a balloon labeled with a specific actor name and containing
goal and plan analysis, conducted from the point of view of the actor. In the
rest of this section we briefly describe the five Tropos phases, specifying

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the main activities of each phase and the process artifacts. The example
are extracted from a case-study which refers to the development of a web-
based broker of cultural information and services (herein eCulturesystem)
for the Province of Trentino, including information obtained from museums,
exhibitions, and other cultural organizations. It is the government’s intention
that the system be usable by a variety of users, including citizens of
Trentino and tourists looking for things to do, or scholars and students
looking for material relevant to their studies.

6.1.1. Early Requirements

The main objective of the early requirement analysis inTropos is

the understanding of a problem by studying an existing organizational
setting. During this phase, the requirement engineer models the
stakeholders as actors and analyzes their intentions, that are modeled as
goals which, through a goal-oriented analysis, are then decomposed into
finer goals, that eventually can support evaluation of alternatives.

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Goal analysis can be concluded by identifyingplans that, if
performed by the actor, allow for goal achievement. The analysis can also
lead to the identification of further dependencies with other actors. When
necessary, we distinguish between hard and soft goals, the latter lacking a
clear-cut definition and/or criteria for deciding whether they are satisfied or
not. Softgoals are amenable to a more qualitative kind of analysis that,
when moving to later phases concerning the system definition, may lead to
the identification of non-functional requirements. The resulting model can
be depicted as an actor diagram. Figure 1 shows the actors involved in the
eCulture project and their respective goals.

In particular, the actor PAT represents the local government and

has been represented with a single relevant goal: increase internet use.
The actors Visitor and Museum have associated softgoals, enjoy visit and
provide cultural services respectively. The actor Citizen wants to get
cultural information and depends on PAT to fulfill the softgoal taxes well
spent, a high level goal that motivates more specific PAT’s responsibilities,
namely to provide an Internet infrastructure, to deliver on the eCulture
system and make it usable too. Some of the dependencies in Figure 1
arise from a refinement of the preliminary model obtained by performing
goal analysis, as depicted, for instance, in Figure 2.

6.1.2. Late Requirements

The late requirement analysis aims at specifying the system-to-be

within its operating environment, along with relevant functions and
qualities. The system is represented as an actor which have a number of
dependencies with the actors already described during the early
requirements phase. These dependencies define all functional and non-
functional requirements for the system-tobe. The actor diagram in Figure 3
includes the eCulture System and shows a set of goals that PAT delegates

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to it through goal dependencies. These goals are then analyzed from the
point of view of the eCulture System and are shown in the goal diagram
depicted in the lower part of Figure 3. In the example we concentrate on
the analysis for the goal provide eCultural services and the softgoal usable
eCulture System.The goal provide eCultural services is decomposed (AND
decomposition) into four subgoals: make reservations, provide info,
educational services and virtual visits. As basic eCultural service, the
eCulture System must provide information (provide info), which can be

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logistic info, and cultural info. Softgoal contributions are than identified. So
for instance, the softgoal usable eCulture System has two positive (+)
contributions from softgoals user friendly eCulture System and available
eCulture System. The former contributes positively because a system must
be user friendly to be usable, whereas the latter contributes positively
because it makes the system portable, scalable, and available over time
(temporal available).

6.1.3. Architectural Design

The main objective of the architectural design phase is the

definition of the system’s global architecture in terms of subsystems
(actors), interconnected through data and control flows (dependencies).
Basically, this phase consists of three steps: refining the system actor
diagram introducing subactors upon analysis of functional and non
functional requirements and taking into account design patterns (step 1);
capturing actor capabilities from the analysis of the tasksthat actors and
sub-actors will carry on in order to fulfill functional requirements (step 2);
defining a set of agent types (components) and in assigning to each
component one or more different capabilities (step 3). A portion of the
architectural design model of the eCulture project, resulting from the first
step, is represented by the actor diagram in

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6.1.4. Detailed Design

The detailed design phase aims at specifying the agent

(component) capabilities and interactions. At this point, usually, the
implementation platform has already been chosen and this can be taken
into account in order to perform a detailed design that will map directly to
the code5. So, for instance, choosing a BDI (Belief Desire Intention)
multiagent platform will require the specification of agent capabilities in
terms of external and internal events that trigger plans, and the beliefs
involved in agent reasoning. These properties are specified through a set
of diagrams. A subset of the AUMLdiagrams proposed in are used: the
activity diagrams (capability diagram) to model a capability (or a set of
correlated capabilities) from the point of view of a specific actor; activity
diagrams (plan diagram) to specify each plan node of a capability diagram;

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and sequence diagrams (agent interaction diagram) to model agents
interaction in terms of communication acts.

6.1.5. Implementation

The implementation activity follows step by step the detailed

design specification, according to the established mapping between the
implementation platform constructs and the detailed design notions. In our
case-study, the JACK Intelligent Agents platform has been chosen for
implementation. JACK is a BDI agent-oriented development environment
built on top and fully integrated with Java, where agents are autonomous
software components that have explicit goals (desires) to achieve or events
to handle. Agents are programmed with a set of plans in order to make
them capable of achieving goals.

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7. Agents in the real-world

The agent-oriented approach is increasingly being applied in

industrial applications, but it is far from as widespread as the object-
oriented approach. This section describes where and how agents have
been applied with success in the manufacturing industry.

Parunak defines agenthood, a taxonomy and a maturity metric in

an industrial context. His purpose is to improve the understanding and
utilization of agent-oriented software engineering in industry. Agenthood,
i.e. agent-oriented programming, is explained as an iterative improvement
of the industry-strength methodology of object-oriented programming.

The taxonomy classifies agent systems as belonging to one of

the following environments: digital (i.e. software and digital hardware),
social (involving human users) or electromechanical (non-digital hardware,
e.g. a motor). Thereafter the taxonomy classifies agents according to the
interface they support. Interface types are similar to the environments:
digital (e.g. communication protocols), social (e.g. user interfaces) and
electromechanical (e.g. motor control interfaces).

Few business users, as opposed to researchers, are early-

adapters of new and immature technology, as a result of this a maturity
metric of agent-based systems is developed to be able to measure the
level of agent technology and systems. The maturity metric has six degrees
ranging from modeled applications to products. Modeled applications, the
least mature, are theoretical applications in the form of architectural
descriptions or analyses. The metric continues with emulated applications
that are relatively immature due to the fact that they are simulations in a lab
environment. Prototype applications represent the next maturity degree,
they run in a non-commercial environment but on real hardware. Pilot

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applications are relatively mature applications, however they are not
expected to be completely bug-free, and after a certain period they usually
become more mature and become production applications. A production
application is being applied in several businesses, but they require support
for installation and maintenance. The most mature applications are
products, they are usually shrink-wrapped and sold over desk, and they
can usually be installed and maintained by the non-expert user.

7.1. Agents in the industry - where and how?

Parunak presents a review of industrial agent applications.

Application areas considered are: manufacturing scheduling, control,
collaboration and agent simulation. Thereafter tools, methodologies,
insights and problems for development of agent systems are presented
and discussed.

Manufacturing scheduling is the ordering and timing of processes

in a production facility. The purpose is to optimize the production by
maximizing the number of units produced per time slot and keep good
quality of the product, and minimize the resource requirements per unit and
the risk of failures. Processes and machinery has to be controlled in order
to operate as scheduled. The control can range from simple regulation of
the power level for a piece of machinery to advanced real-time cybernetic
control of processes. For many industries, human collaboration is needed
to solve complex problems, e.g. in a design process engineers and
designers have to collaborate in order to guarantee that products are
pleasent to look in addition to being safe. In industries such as electronics
production, there are tremendous setup costs for production facilities,
consequently there is a need for cost-efficient simulation of the
manufacturing processes.

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8. Typical applications of agent programming

mobile computing

The following distinguishing characteristics of an agent are

suitable for a wide area mobile networking environment.

Mobility: Mobile computing exhibits an inherently transient nature i.e. host

locations constantly change. Transactions span many nodes and are short
lived. The ability of agents to carry code and data across network nodes
underlines their suitability to a transient environment.

Concurrent problem solving: Agents provide a clear, natural paradigm

for performing tasks, which may have several concurrent aspects.
Autonomous security model: Each agent is assigned a privilege level. The
agent is only granted as much privilege as it needs. Agent may also
transfer ,user or system privileges.

Proxy Handling: Agents can behave simultaneously as server proxies or

client proxies at any node. Server proxies emulate the functionality or
presence of a server while client proxies emulate the same for client.

Communication traffic routing: Determining the optimum network path

for network communication has always as been near impossible task as no
model of the existing network traffic can take into account the variable
nature of the data traffic. An autonomous agent can be programmed to
take into account the variable nature of such traffic and can dynamically
optimize the network path of such large networks.

Information scouts: Intelligent agents can be used for collecting data. The
information scouting agents go through the network, communicating with
the user and other agents for achieving their goals. example. Segue

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represents pages in browsing history using a series of ‘skeins’ which
represent changes in interest over time.
Butterfly: Samples thousands of real time conversational group &
recommends those that are of interest.

Air traffic control : This is a very demanding task, getting all circling
planes to land safely. An agent can be designed to do the task efficiently,
taking care of the weather conditions and other factors. Other examples of
agent are KidSim agent, IBM agent, Hayes- Roth agent etc.

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CONCLUSION

We need to program an agent which meets all the required

abilities can be quiet a daunting task as qualities such as desire and belief
have to be incorporated within the agent and a framework for sharing with
other agents has to be designed thereby requiring elements of AAI to be
incorporated into the agent. At times, adapted neural network processes
have been used to build an agent. The agent oriented programming
paradigm holds much promise for the future and once used, will pave the
way for more self aware, efficient agents that could be deployed in almost
every conceivable situation that demands complex reactions and actions.

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REFERENCES

• http://www.cs.berkely.edu
• http://www.agentlab.de/aose.html
• http://web.media.mib.edu
• www.ooptips.org/db-design.html
• www.csc.liv.ac.uk
• www.ecoop2000.unice.fr
• www.lamda.weblogs.com
• http://vsys-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de
• www,csc.liv.ac.uk
• www.auml.org/auml/supplements/BrescianiAgent2001.pdf
• www.ncat.edu/~esterlin/c7902502/notes/Shoham.pdf
• www.cia.mty.itesm.mx/~rbrena/SMA/aop.ppt
• wscg.zcu.cz/Rotor/Net_2003/papers/Vecchiola.pdf

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ABSTRACT

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most

recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several
benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the
ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a
software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and
industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on
more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software
engineering.

We know that people/systems depend on other people/systems

to accomplish tasks or goals, people/systems make commitments to
provide a task or meet a goal people/systems have strategies to ensure
their goals are accomplished. Agent-oriented approaches model people
and systems as agents.

Agent oriented programming is an emerging programming

paradigm with roots in the domain of artificial intelligence. This paradigm is
often described to as the natural successor to object oriented paradigm.
Highly suited to applications which are embedded in complex dynamic
environments, it is based on human concepts such as belief, goals and
plans. This allows a natural specification of sophisticated software systems
in terms that are similar to human understanding, allowing programmers to
concentrate on the critical properties of the application rather than getting
absorbed in the intricacies of complicated environment.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ESSENTIALS OF AOP

AGENT

AGENT CLASSIFICATION

LANGUAGES

COMPARISON OF OOP &AOP

1. METHODOLOGIES

2. AGENTS IN REAL WORLD

3. TYPICAL APPLICATIONS OF AGENT PROGRAMMING MOBILE

COMPUTING

CONCLUSION

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I express my sincere thanks to Prof. M.N Agnisarman

Namboothiri (Head of the Department, Computer Science and Engineering,
MESCE), Mr. Zainul Abid (Staff incharge) for their kind co-operation for
presenting the seminar.

I also extend my sincere thanks to all other members of the faculty of

Computer Science and Engineering Department and my friends for their co-
operation and encouragement.

Sunitha P. Kutty

Dept. of CSE -38- MESCE Kuttippuram