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From Active Objects to Autonomous Agents Active Objects Objects and Agents for Simulation and Information Systems (oasis)
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Guessoum, Zahia Briot, Jean-Pierre |
| Copyright Year | 1999 |
| Abstract | facilities for implementing agent communication , and the concept of encapsulating objects lets us combine various agent gran-ularities. Furthermore, the inheritance mechanism enables knowledge specialization and factorization. The concept of an active object—inte-grating an object and activity (namely a thread or process)—provides some degree of autonomy in that it does not rely on external resources for activation. Thus, it provides a good basis for implementing agents. However, an active object's behavior still remains procedural and only reacts to message requests. More generally, we consider that to be autonomous, agents must be able to perform numerous functions or activities without external intervention over extended time periods. To achieve autonomy , several researchers have proposed adding to an active object a function that controls message reception and processing by considering its internal state. 2,3 There are two basic questions regarding how to build a bridge between implementing and modeling multiagent-system requirements 4,5 and the facilities and techniques OOCP provides: 6 • How can a generic structure define an autonomous agent's main features? • How do we accommodate the highly structured OOCP model in this generic structure? 6 Here we attempt to answer these two questions. We deal with multiagent-system modeling requirements by providing a generic and modular agent architecture. We also discuss extending OOCP's implementation and modeling facilities. More concretely, we describe how to extend an active object's model (the Actalk—actors in smalltalk—framework) 2 towards a generic and modular agent architecture (the DIMA—Development and Implementation of MultiAgent systems—platform). Carl Hewitt introduced the active-object (or actor) concept to describe a set of entities that cooperate and communicate through message passing. This concept brings the benefits of object orientation (for example, modularity and encapsulation) to distributed environments and provides The authors describe how they extended a framework of active objects, named Actalk, into a generic multiagent platform, named DIMA. They discuss how they implemented this extension and report on one DIMA application that simulates economic models. O bject-oriented concurrent programming (OOCP) is the most appropriate and promising technology for implementing agents. Combining the agent concept and the object paradigm leads to the notion of agent-oriented programming. 1 The uniformity of objects' communication mechanisms provides |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~guessoum/myPapers/IEEE.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
