Intelligent Agent part 4: Implementation with OO programming

Intelligent agent implementation using Object Oriented programming paradigm

Wooldridge in Multiagents Systems provides a comparison between object oriented system and agent system paradigm, which seems awkward in the sense that the two paradigms serve different purposes. According to his reasoning, OO does share agent system characteristics by exhibiting autonomy over its state (and object control its state by making it private), however fails in controlling its behaviour (because once object methods are made public, control is switched to external object) contradicting the autonomy notion of agent. Other observations include the fact the agent have their own thread of control whereas in standard object model, a single thread of control is allocated to the entire system.

Actually, OO paradigm is sophisticated enough to provide mechanism required by the agent specification. For example, the access control granularity of object could allow to make only state information visible through methods and no operation done on the objects themselves (or condition could be applicable to the operation in order to respect the autonomy notion of the object), furthermore most OO implementation offers robust multi-threading control capacity, etc.). Surprisingly, the article refers to active object, which shares the property just mentioned, and also mentions that OO system can be used to build agent based system. We could add that it is actually being used, see Bigus for specific application example. Furthermore, from an ad-hoc search on the current software architecture currently available in building agent-based system, we see that the majority of development frameworks are actually originated from OO language implementation (reference: http://www.multiagent.com/) and most of them are actually from a well accepted general purposes language, i.e. Java:

Academic research based:

• Cougaar Agent Architecture (http://www.cougaar.org/)

• Jadex BDI Agent System (http://vsys1.informatik.uni-hamburg.de//projects/jadex/)

• JATLite (http://java.stanford.edu/)

• JATLiteBean (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/emanuela/JATLiteBean/)

• Java Communicating Agents (http://jacomma.sourceforge.net/)

• JESS, the Java Expert System Shell (http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/)

• MAP, a Mobile Agent Platform (http://sun195.iit.unict.it/MAP/)

• Excalibur (http://www.ai-center.com/projects/excalibur/)

• Bee-gent Multi Agent Framework (http://www2.toshiba.co.jp/beegent/index.htm)

• Zeus Agent Building Toolkit (http://more.btexact.com/projects/agents/zeus/index.htm)

Commercial based product:

• Jade (http://jade.tilab.com/)

• CybelePro (http://www.cougaar.org/)

• JACK Intelligent Agent (http://www.agent-software.com.au/jack.html)

• Living Systems Technology Suite (http://www.whitestein.com/pages/solutions/ls_ts.html)

• TSpaces (http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/TSpaces/)

Taken from

“Constructing Intelligent Agents with Java” (1998) from J.P. Bigus and Internet ad-hoc researches