Agents As Objects With Knowledge Base State

by Skarmeas, Nikolaos

• ISBN13: 9781860941078
• ISBN10: 1860941079
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Imperial College Pr

Summary

Advances in computer technology in general and computer networks in particular have significantly affected the requirements of modern applications, where the need to operate in decentralised environments is of primary importance. The conceptual models of the applications are also becoming complex and semantically rich. A promising technology towards the design and development of systems of such domains is agent based systems. Agents, having a knowledge component, act and interact with other agents and information sources in order to achieve some goals. Platforms intended for l supporting the development of such systems should offer a number of features, including communication, concurrency, mobility, high level data structures, object orientation etc. This book describes the design and implementation of such a language platform called April++ and its use on a number of applications. Methodologically, in designing and implementing the language, a layered approach has been adopted. April++ has been developed as a series of mecro defined layers on top of the relatively primitive features of a pre-existing language called April. On top of April++ a number of application layers have been built, specific for the application domains considered. This includes a mobile agent application, a distributed database application and a network management one.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Part 1 Introduction	3	(184)
Background Material	3	(36)
Object Oriented Programming	3	(6)
Encapsulation and information hiding	4	(1)
Re-usability	5	(2)
Polymorphism	7	(1)
Components: extending the object oriented paradigm	7	(2)
Communication and Concurrency	9	(6)
Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Agent Systems	15	(8)
Agent architectures	15	(6)
Mobility	21	(2)
Programming Languages	23	(15)
Summary	38	(1)
The Building Blocks	39	(30)
Review of the April Language	40	(7)
A simple directory agent as an April process	42	(3)
Forking and using the directory agent	45	(1)
A communication scenario with the April directory agent	46	(1)
Dynamically Customising the Matchmaking Process	47	(6)
Concurrent queries	52	(1)
The AdB Persistent Storage System	53	(3)
The DialoX Interface	56	(2)