Abstract
This paper describes an open language framework based on concurrent object-oriented programming. In this computational model, autonomous active objects are used to specify interacting agents. Many researchers have indicated the suitability of concurrent object-oriented programming as a base for multi-agent languages [Pog94][Sho93], but we claim that powerful coordination constructs are needed to achieve better expressive power in the language. Our language framework supports two kinds of semantics for coordination in the agent space:
-
Sender-initiated coordination by means of pattern-based group communication.
-
Receiver-initiated coordination by means of multi-object synchronisation constraints.
Both facilities are integrated in the type-system of the language. A type serves as a partial specification of an agent's behaviour. Type-based coordination combined with a meta-level enables an efficient simulation of the agent space on a distributed memory machine.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
G. Agha. ACTORS: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems. The MIT Press series in artificial intelligence, 1986.
Pierre America. Pool-T: A Parallel Object-Oriented Language. In M. Tokoro and A. Yonezawa, editors, Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming, pages 199–220. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.
Inc. American National Standards Institute. The Programming Language Ada Reference Manual. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 155, 1983.
S. Bijnens. The Correlate Language Definition and Architecture. Technical Report 94-4SB, Dept. of Computer Science, KULeuven, 1994.
Bob Bywater, Wouter Joosen; Stijn Bijnens, Pierre Verbaeten, Thomas Larsen, and John Perram. Parallel Simulation Software for Drug Design. In HPCN Europe 94, pages 189–196. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 796, Springer Verlag, 1994.
Stijn Bijnens, Wouter Joosen, Jan Pollet, Yolande Berbers, and Pierre Verbaeten. Active Objects, Message Passing and Concurrency Control in XENOOPS. In Proceedings of the TOOLS EUROPE'93 Workshop on Distributed Objects and Concurrency, March 1993.
Stijn Bijnens, Wouter Joosen, and Pierre Verbaeten. A Reflective Invocation Scheme to Realise Advanced Object Management. In R. Guerraoui, O Nierstrasz, and M. Riveill, editors, Object-Based Distributed Programming, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 791, pages 139–151. Springer-Verlag, 1994.
Jacques Ferber. Computational Reflection in class-based object-oriented languages. In Proceedings of OOPSLA '89, pages 317–326. ACM Sigplan Notices, October 1989.
Oscar Nierstrasz. Regular Types for Active Objects. In Proceedings of OOP-SLA '93, pages 1–15. ACM Sigplan Notices, October 1993.
A. Poggi. Agents and Resources Management with CUBL. In Proceedings of the 27th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pages 112–121. IEEE Computer Society Press, January 1994.
Rajendra K. Ray, Ewan Tempero, and Henry M. Levy. Emerald: A General-Purpose Programming Language. Software: Practice and Experience, 21(1):91–92, January 1991.
Y. Shoham. Agent-Oriented Programming. Artificial Intelligence, (60):51–92, 1993.
T. Sueyoshi and M. Tokoro. Dynamic Modeling of Agents for Coordination. In Proceedings of the European Workshop on Modeling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World (MAAMAW'90), August 1990.
A. Yonezawa. ABCL: An Object Oriented Concurrent System. The MIT Press series in artificial intelligence, 1990.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bijnens, S., Joosen, W., Verbaeten, P. (1996). Language constructs for coordination in an agent space. In: Perram, J.W., Müller, JP. (eds) Distributed Software Agents and Applications. MAAMAW 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1069. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61157-6_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61157-6_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61157-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68335-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive