Skip to main content

ALBA: A Generic Library for Programming Mobile Agents with Prolog

  • Conference paper
Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4411))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This paper presents ALBA, a generic library dedicated to the commissioning of mobile agents written in Prolog. This library offers a handful of mechanisms for autonomous agent creation, execution, communication and mobility, whose implementation strongly respects the principles of robustness, decentralization of data, flexibility and genericity. In this perspective, the following paper mainly focuses on ALBA architecture and implementation with an emphasis on the technical choices which were made to provide these essential features. It therefore presents an innovative migration protocol, a research algorithm of agents solely identified by their names. It exposes some considerations about communication handling in a fully decentralized environment and some ideas towards a distributed modularity of systems. It also highlights an agent model, called Reasoning Threads, that is being used on top of ALBA to program cognitive agents.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Available at, http://www.sics.se/isl/sicstuswww/site/index.html

  2. Langshaw Austin, J.: How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon Press, Oxford (1962)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Barbuceanu, M., Fox, M.S.: Cool: A language for describing coordination in multiagent systems. In: Lesser, V., Gasser, L. (eds.) Proceedings of the First International Conference oil Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-95), San Francisco, CA, USA, pp. 17–24. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Chess, D., Harrison, C., Kershenbaum, A.: Mobile Agents: Are They a Good Idea? Technical report, IBM Research Division Report (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Chopinaud, C., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Taillibert, P.: Prevention of Harmful Behaviors within Cognitive and Autonomous Agents. In: Proc. of the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI’06), August 2006, pp. 205–209 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Clark, K., Robinson, P.J., Hagen, R.: Multithreading and message communication in Qu-prolog. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 1(3) (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Dahl, T.S.: The eel programming language and internal concurrency in logic agents. In: The Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems in Logic Programming (ICLP’99), Las Cruces, New Mexico, November 29 - December 4 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Denti, E., Omicini, A.: From tuple spaces to tuple centers. Sci. Comput. Program. 41, 277–294 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Denti, E., Omicini, A., Ricci, A.: Multi-paradigm java-prolog integration in tuprolog. Sci. Comput. Program. 57(2), 217–250 (2005)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  10. Ding, G., Bhargava, B.K.: Peer-to-peer file-sharing over mobile ad hoc networks. In: PerCom Workshops, pp. 104–108 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Dinont, C., Druon, E., Mathieu, P., Taillibert, P.: Artifacts for time-aware agents. In: Fifth Int. conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagents Systems (AAMAS 06), Hakodate, Japan, 8–12 May (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  12. d’Inverno, M., Luck, M.: Understanding autonomous interaction. In: ECAI, pp. 529–533 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Georgeff, M., Lansky, A.: Procedural knowledge. Proceedings of the IEEE (Special Issue on Knowledge Representation) 74, 1383–1398 (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Cabeza Gras, D., Hermenegildo, M.V.: The ciao module system: A new module system for prolog. Electr. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. 30(3) (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Kuwabara, K., Ishida, T., Osato, N.: Agentalk: Coordination protocol description for multiagent systems. In: Lesser, V. (ed.) Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi–Agent Systems, San Francisco, CA, p. 455. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Labrou, Y., Finin, T.: A Proposal for a New KQML Specification. Technical Report TR CS-97-03, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, University of Maryland Baltimore County (February 1997)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Lange, D.B., Oshima, M.: Seven Good Reasons for Mobile Agents. Commun. ACM 42(3), 88–89 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Odell, J.: Objects and Agents Compared. Journal of object technology 1(1), 41–53 (2002)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  19. Rao, A.S., Georgeff, M.P.: BDI-Agents: from Theory to Practice. In: Proceedings of the First Intl. Conference on Multiagent Systems, San Francisco (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Ricci, A., Viroli, M., Omicini, A.: Programming MAS with Artifacts. In: Proc. of the Third International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems’05, July, pp. 163–178 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Ricordel, P.-M., Demazeau, Y.: From Analysis to Deployment: A Multi-agent Platform Survey. In: Omicini, A., Tolksdorf, R., Zambonelli, F. (eds.) ESAW 2000. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1972, pp. 93–105. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  22. Shoham, Y.: Agent-oriented programming. Artif. Intell. 60(1), 51–92 (1993)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  23. Smith, R.G.: The contract net protocol: High-level communication and control in a distributed problem solver. IEEE Transactions on Computers 29(12) (1980)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Tarau, P.: Jinni: Intelligent mobile agent programming at the intersection of java and prolog. In: Proceedings of PAAM’99, London (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Weerasooriya, D., Rao, A., Ramamohanarao, K.: Design of a Concurrent Agent-Oriented Language. In: Wooldridge, M.J., Jennings, N.R. (eds.) Intelligent Agents. LNCS, vol. 890, pp. 386–402. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Rafael H. Bordini Mehdi Dastani Jürgen Dix Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Devèze, B., Chopinaud, C., Taillibert, P. (2007). ALBA: A Generic Library for Programming Mobile Agents with Prolog. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., Seghrouchni, A.E.F. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4411. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71956-4_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71956-4_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71955-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71956-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics