AN OBJECT-ORIENTED LANGUAGE FOR DISTRIBUTED ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE

In this work, we are presenting an object-oriented language to define distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) systems. This language allows for the description of control and communication management, a hierarchical representation of a DAI system at different levels of detail, and the simulation of its performance. The language is based on three different entities-sequential actors, distributed actors and channel managers. A sequential actor describes a single DAI module (agent). A distributed actor represents a net of agents characterizing both a whole DAI system and its sub-parts. A channel manager administers channel communications among agents. This paper specifically illustrates (i) how data and procedural abstraction properties of such a language satisfy all the representation requirements for modelling DAI systems, and (ii) how message passing in an access-oriented paradigm can be an excellent basis for the representation of the mechanisms which drive the performance of a DAI system. We conclude with an example of the language application. © 1993 Academic Press. All rights reserved.