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Objective: a Common Formal Model of ``Agent''

The concept of agent is currently emerging as an important concept in many fields of Information Technology:

  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. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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:

  1. goal: each agent is trying to achieve through cooperation a precise objective under given constraints.
  2. state: agents have an internal, imperfect representation of the world (including the state of agents), on which their decisions are based.
  3. behaviour: agents act, communicate and perceive, showing thus an external behaviour that obeys the constraints given.
  4. 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. In any case, the cross-fertilisation provided by this research will be very valuable, as shown in the past by members of ModelAge. To ensure precision, the model will formal, i.e. mathematically described. The many formalisms used in each field could then be grounded in this common semantic framework, allowing an integrated multi-formalism approach. This approach would result in large savings for the development of information systems requiring multidisciplinary techniques, which are acquiring an ever-increasing importance.



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Pierre-Yves Schobbens
Fri Nov 25 10:58:38 WET 1994