A resilient BDI architecture for multi-agent systems

Paolo Busetta
Computer Science, University of Melbourne

Friday, 28th August 1998
0930 - 1100

Meeting rooms 1 & 2 (off Lesley Clucas lounge)
Building 12, level 4, RMIT
Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Abstract:

Multi-agent systems offer a powerful paradigm for developing distributed systems.  At the moment, however, the available frameworks seem to overlook a number of engineering issues such as concurrency control, exception management, recovery, migration.

We propose an architecture, TOMAS (Transaction Oriented Multi Agent System), as foundation for reliable multi-agent systems.  TOMAS adopts the distributed nested transaction paradigm as computational model for the well known BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) agent architecture.

In this talk, we give an overview of a simple formalism that we developed to specify the operational semantics of BDI agents, and present the nested transaction model.  We then discuss TOMAS, focusing on some of the properties which have been proven with our formalism and comparing it with the conventional BDI architecture.  We conclude with a short presentation of the prototype of TOMAS, developed in Java and available from the author's Web page.

Biosketch:

Paolo Busetta completed his graduate studies in Computer Science in 1986 at the Universita' delle Scienze, Turin, Italy.  He has been a software engineer for more than a decade, having worked for a number of companies in Italy, including Digital Equipment Corporation and CSELT (the Italian telecom research lab).  From 1995 to 1997, he was a senior researcher and engineer at the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII) in Melbourne, Australia.

Currently, he is a postgraduate student of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Melbourne.  His research addresses the issues of robustness of software for Intelligent Agents.  He also cooperates with Agent Oriented Software, Melbourne, on consultancy and training in agent systems.