Following the definition of ‘software architecture’ from Bass et al. (2005) as “the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them”, we regard an ‘agent architecture’ as the control structures that facilitate the specification and execution of agent behavior.
Published in Chapter:
Using Rule-Based Concepts as Foundation for Higher-Level Agent Architectures
Lars Braubach (University of Hamburg, Germany), Alexander Pokahr (University of Hamburg, Germany), and Adrian Paschke (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 32
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-402-6.ch021
Abstract
Declarative programming using rules has advantages in certain application domains and has been successfully applied in many real world software projects. Besides building rule-based applications, rule concepts also provide a proven basis for the development of higher-level architectures, which enrich the existing production rule metaphor with further abstractions. One especially interesting application domain for this technology is the behavior specification of autonomous software agents, because rule bases help fulfilling key characteristics of agents such as reactivity and proactivity. This chapter details which motivations promote the usage of rule bases for agent behavior control and what kinds of approaches exist. Concretely, these approaches are in the context of four existing agent architectures (pure rule-based, AOP, Soar, BDI) and their implementations (Rule Responder, Agent-0 and successors, Soar, and Jadex). In particular, this chapter emphasizes in which respect these agent architectures make use of rules and with what mechanisms they extend the base functionality. Finally, the approaches are generalized by summarizing their core assumptions and extension mechanisms and possible further application domains besides agent architectures are presented.