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(This section is detailed in appendix 
, and summarized in , .)
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:
- Requirements Engineering: identifying agents and their goals is a main
step of RE.
- 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.
- Concurrency: formal model of concurrent programs include
the notions of state (unstructured), communication, action, behaviour.
Its enrichment with commitments, goals would ease the understanding
of these concurrent programs.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- goal: each agent is trying to achieve through cooperation a precise objective
under given constraints.
- state: agents have an internal, imperfect representation of the world (including the state of agents), on which their decisions are based.
- behaviour: agents act, communicate and perceive, showing thus an external behaviour
that obeys the constraints given.
- heterogeneity: agents may be software, hardware systems or human organisations.
The collaborations already undertaken between members of ModelAge
make us believe
that a common model may be found.
To ensure precision, the model will formal, i.e. mathematically described.
In any case, the cross-fertilisation provided by this research will be very valuable, as shown in the past by members of ModelAge
e.g. by 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 (given a formal semantic definition) in this common semantic framework,
allowing an integrated multi-formalism approach.
Then the most promising of
these languages could be extended to make fuller use of the richness
of the underlying model.
This approach would result
in large savings for the development of information systems requiring
multidisciplinary techniques, which are acquiring an ever-increasing importance.
The definition of a general purpose common language is not among
the objectives of ModelAge, as we believe that multiple
languages are necessary, each one offering a natural treatment of
a specific domain, that are integrated by semantic rather than syntactic
means.
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