Meta-APL: a general language for agent programming

Doan, Thu Trang (2014) Meta-APL: a general language for agent programming. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

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Abstract

A key advantage of BDI-based agent programming is that agents can deliberate about which course of action to adopt to achieve a goal or respond to an event. However while state-of-the-art BDI-based agent programming languages provide flexible support for expressing plans, they are typically limited to a single, hard-coded, deliberation strategy(perhaps with some parameterisation) for all task environments. In this thesis, we describe a novel agent programming language, meta-APL, that allows both agent programs and the agent’s deliberation strategy to be encoded in the same programming language. Key steps in the execution cycle of meta-APL are reflected in the state of the agent and can be queried and updated by meta-APL rules, allowing a wide range of BDI deliberation strategies to be programmed. We give the syntax and the operational semantics of meta-APL, focussing on the connections between the agent’s state and its implementation. Finally, to illustrate the flexibility of meta-APL, we show how Jason and 3APL programs and deliberation strategy can be translated into meta-APL to give equivalent behaviour under weak bisimulation equivalence.

Item Type: Thesis (University of Nottingham only) (PhD)
Supervisors: Alechina, N.
Logan, B.S.
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA 75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Faculties/Schools: UK Campuses > Faculty of Science > School of Computer Science
Item ID: 29286
Depositing User: Lashkova, Mrs Olga
Date Deposited: 06 Jul 2015 15:22
Last Modified: 14 Oct 2017 16:26
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/29286

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