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Working Group Objectives

The goal of ModelAge is to establish a common formal model of the concept of agent, usable across a wide number of fields of Information Technology, where its importance is now appearing:
  1. Requirements Engineering: identifying agents and their goals is a main step of RE.
  2. Software Design: setting up a society of agents is a crucial point in modern design; in its simplest form, it means designing concurrent programs and their communication protocols.
  3. Data Bases: federative data bases group agents, each having its knowledge (an incomplete and sometimes incorrect representation of the external world), access protocol, and goals. The dynamic, or behavioural, aspect becomes thus essential.
  4. Artificial Intelligence: knowledge-based systems are often designed as a set of cooperating agents (experts); each of them has particular knowledge, communication protocols, and goals of cooperation with some other agents.
  5. Organization Theory: agents may represent individuals, organizations, or computer systems having a function (= a goal), a mental state, and fixed means of action and communication (protocols).

In each of these fields, the key facets of an agent appear to be:

The collaborations already undertaken between members of ModelAge make us believe that a common model may be found. To ensure precision, the model will be formal, i.e. mathematically described. Examples of cross-fertilisations already explored by members of ModelAge include the application of deontic logics, originally designed to formalise human organisations, to software specification; the introduction of the notion of behaviour and goals into data base theory; the use of belief logics (also originally modelling humans) in concurrent systems; the introduction of behaviour in software specification. The many formalisms used in each field could then be grounded in this common semantic framework, allowing an integrated multi-formalism approach.




Next: Results Up: No Title Previous: Working Group Overview


pyschobbens@info.fundp.ac.be
Thu Aug 11 13:52:30 WET DST 1994