nach oben

Erschienen in:

2015 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

A Future for Agent Programming

verfasst von : Brian Logan

Erschienen in: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

There has been considerable progress in both the theory and practice of agent programming since Georgeff & Rao’s seminal work on the Belief-Desire-Intention paradigm. However, despite increasing interest in the development of autonomous systems, applications of agent programming are confined to a small number of niche areas, and adoption of agent programming languages in mainstream software development remains limited. This state of affairs is widely acknowledged within the community, and a number of remedies have been proposed. In this paper, I will offer one more. Starting from the class of problems agent programming sets out to solve, I will argue that a combination of Moore’s Law and advances elsewhere in AI, mean that key assumptions underlying the design of many BDI-based agent programming languages no longer hold. As a result, we are now in a position where we can rethink the foundations of BDI programming languages, and address some of the key challenges in agent development that have been largely ignored for the last twenty years. By doing so, I believe we can create theories and languages that are much more powerful and easy to use, and significantly broaden the impact of the work we do.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Nächstes Kapitel Towards Agent Aggregates: Perspectives and Challenges

Programming frameworks for the development of MAS are an important output of the agent programming community, but are not essential for the implementation of individual autonomous systems.

The engagement of industry with the AAMAS conference as a whole also does not seem a particularly relevant metric when considering future directions for engineering multi-agent systems. AAMAS is a large conference, and there are typically only a relatively small number of papers on agent programming; even if these papers were very relevant to industry, industrial engagement with the conference as a whole could still be low.

The alternative interpretation, that they are all necessary for the wider adoption of APLs, implies that agent programming as a field must progress on a very broad front, and is even more daunting than my analysis below.

There are, of course, overlaps between the two views. In particular, there is a strand of work in what I am characterising as the AI-oriented view, that focuses on the engineering of intelligent autonomous systems. However the focus of work in the software engineering-oriented tradition is much less on AI and more on distributed systems.

The argument that an APL should include only basic plan selection features seems spurious for another reason—most widely used programming languages provide support for many more features than will be used in any particular application.

Creative Commons ‘Transistor Count and Moore’s Law’ by Wgsimon used under CC-BY-SA-3.0. Transistor counts circa 1987 and 1996 highlighted.

www.icaps-conference.org.

The figure is from http://users.ics.aalto.fi/rintanen/jussi/satplan.html and is reproduced here with the permission of the author. See also [20].

The 2014 edition of the International Planning Competition included a Sequential Agile track for the first time. The objective of the Agile track is to ‘minimize the CPU time needed for finding a plan’.

See, for example http://rx.codeplex.com.

http://msdn.microsoft.com.

http://code.google.com/p/cqengine.

A similar point is made by Hindriks [13] when he advocates easy access to powerful AI techniques. However Hindriks sees this as a desirable rather than a necessary feature.

Computer science curricula 2013: Curriculum guidelines for undergraduate degree programs in computer science. ACM/IEEE, December 2013

Bellifemine, F.L., Caire, G., Greenwood, D.: Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE. Wiley, Chichester (2007)CrossRef

Bordini, R., Bazzan, A.L.C., de O. Jannone, R., Basso, D.M., Vicari, R.M., Lesser, V.R.: AgentSpeak(XL): efficient intention selection in BDI agents via decision-theoretic task scheduling. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS’02), pp. 1294–1302. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA (2002)

Bordini, R.H., Hübner, J.F., Wooldridge, M.: Programming multi-agent systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. Wiley Series in Agent Technology. Wiley, New York (2007)MATHCrossRef

Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W.: Jadex: A BDI-agent system combining middleware and reasoning. In: Unland, R., Calisti, M., Klusch, M. (eds.) Software Agent-Based Applications, Platforms and Development Kits. Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies, pp. 143–168. Birkhuser, Basel (2005)CrossRef

Dastani, M.: 2APL: a practical agent programming language. Auton. Agent. Multi-Agent Syst. 16(3), 214–248 (2008)CrossRef

Dignum, V., Dignum, F.: Designing agent systems: state of the practice. Int. J. Agent-Oriented Softw. Eng. 4(3), 224–243 (2010)CrossRef

Dix, J., Hindriks, K.V., Logan, B., Wobcke, W.: Engineering multi-agent systems (Dagstuhl seminar 12342). Dagstuhl Rep. 2(8), 74–98 (2012)

Gabriel, R.P.: Lisp: good news, bad news, how to win big. In: European Conference on the Practical Applications of Lisp (1990) (Reprinted in the April 1991 issue of AI Expert magazine)

10.

Georgeff, M.P., Lansky, A.L.: Reactive reasoning and planning. In: Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-87, pp. 677–682 (1987)

11.

Georgeff, M., Pell, B., Pollack, M.E., Tambe, M., Wooldridge, M.J.: The Belief-Desire-Intention model of agency. In: Papadimitriou, C., Singh, M.P., Müller, J.P. (eds.) ATAL 1998. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1555, pp. 1–10. Springer, Heidelberg (1999) CrossRef

12.

Hindriks, K.V.: Programming rational agents in GOAL. In: El Fallah, A., Seghrouchni, J.D., Dastani, M., Bordini, R.H. (eds.) Multi-Agent Programming: Languages. Tools and Applications, pp. 119–157. Springer, US (2009)CrossRef

13.

Hindriks, K.V.: The shaping of the agent-oriented mindset. In: Dalpiaz, F., Dix, J., van Riemsdijk, M.B. (eds.) EMAS 2014. LNCS, vol. 8758, pp. 1–14. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)

14.

Jennings, N.R.: Agent-oriented software engineering. In: Imam, I., Kodratoff, Y., El-Dessouki, A., Ali, M. (eds.) IEA/AIE 1999. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1611, pp. 4–10. Springer, Heidelberg (1999) CrossRef

15.

Müller, J.P., Fischer, K.: Application impact of multi-agent systems and technologies: a survey. In: Shehory, O., Sturm, A. (eds.) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, pp. 27–53. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)

16.

Padgham, L., Singh, D.: Situational preferences for BDI plans. In: Gini, M.L., Shehory, O., Ito, T., Jonker, C.M. (eds.) International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS ’13, pp. 1013–1020. IFAAMAS (2013)

17.

Patchett, C.: Robotics and Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Opportunities for the UK (2014)

18.

Rao, A.S., Georgeff, M.P.: Modeling rational agents within a BDI-architecture. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR’91), pp. 473–484 (1991)

19.

Rao, A.S.: AgentSpeak(L): BDI agents speak out in a logical computable language. In: Perram, J., Van de Velde, W. (eds.) MAAMAW 1996. LNCS, vol. 1038, pp. 42–55. Springer, Heidelberg (1996) CrossRef

20.

Rintanen, J.: Planning as satisfiability: heuristics. Artif. Intell. 193, 45–86 (2012)MATHMathSciNetCrossRef

21.

Sardiña, S., de Silva, L., Padgham, L.: Hierarchical planning in BDI agent programming languages: a formal approach. In: Nakashima, H., Wellman, M.P., Weiss, E., Stone, P. (eds.) 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 1001–1008. ACM, Hakodate (2006)CrossRef

22.

Sardiña, S., Padgham, L.: Goals in the context of BDI plan failure and planning. In: Durfee, E.H., Yokoo, M., Huhns, M.N., Shehory, O. (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2007), pp. 1–8. ACM (2007)

23.

Singh, D., Hindriks, K.V.: Learning to improve agent behaviours in GOAL. In: Dastani, M., Hübner, J.F., Logan, B. (eds.) ProMAS 2012. LNCS, vol. 7837, pp. 158–173. Springer, Heidelberg (2013) CrossRef

24.

Thangarajah, J., Harland, J., Morley, D., Yorke-Smith, N.: Suspending and resuming tasks in BDI agents. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS’08), pp. 405–412, Estoril, Portugal, May 2008

25.

Thangarajah, J., Harland, J., Morley, D.N., Yorke-Smith, N.: Quantifying the completeness of goals in BDI agent systems. In: Schaub, T., Friedrich, G., O’Sullivan, B. (eds.) ECAI 2014–21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 18–22 August 2014, Prague, Czech Republic - Including Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS 2014), pp. 879–884. IOS Press (2014)

26.

Thangarajah, J., Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: Detecting & avoiding interference between goals in intelligent agents. In: Gottlob, G., Walsh, T. (eds.) Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), pp. 721–726. Morgan Kaufmann, August 2003

27.

Vikhorev, K., Alechina, N., Logan, B.: Agent programming with priorities and deadlines. In: Turner, K., Yolum, P., Sonenberg, L., Stone, P. (eds.) Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011), pp. 397–404, Taipei, Taiwan, May 2011

28.

Walczak, A., Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W.: Augmenting BDI agents with deliberative planning techniques. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., Fallah Seghrouchni, A. (eds.) PROMAS 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4411, pp. 113–127. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) CrossRef

29.

Willetts, D.: Eight Great Technologies. Policy Exchange (2013)

30.

Winikoff, M.: JACK\(^{\text{ TM }}\) Intelligent agents: an industrial strength platform. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A. (eds.) Multi-Agent Programming. Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, pp. 175–193. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)CrossRef

31.

Winikoff, M.: Challenges and directions for engineering multi-agent systems. CoRR, abs/1209.1428 (2012)

32.

Yao, Y., Logan, B., Thangarajah, J.: SP-MCTS-based intention scheduling for BDI agents. In: Schaub, T., Friedrich, G., O’Sullivan, B. (eds.) Proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2014), pp. 1133–1134. IOS Press, Prague, Czech Republic (2014)

Titel: A Future for Agent Programming
verfasst von: Brian Logan
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26183-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-26184-3

Copyright-Jahr: 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_1

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Premium Partner