Heterogeneous Agent Systems

V. S. Subrahmanian
vs@cs.umd.edu
Computer Science, UMCP

2:00pm Friday September 17, 1999
Lecture Hall V

Over the years, many different agent programming languages have been proposed. In this talk, we propose a concept called Agent Programs using which, the way an agent should act in various situations can be declaratively specified by the creator of that agent. Agent Programs may be built on top of arbitrary pieces of software code and may be used to specify what an agent is obliged to do, what an agent may do, and what an agent may not do. We define several successively more sophisticated and epistemically satisfying declarative semantics for agent programs. We further show that agent programs cleanly extend well understood semantics for logic programs, and thus are clearly linked to existing results on logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. We present an overview of complexity results and a prototype implementation. Joint work with T. Eiter and G. Pick.