Time, communication and synchronisation in an agent-based programming language

The author describes an approach to the representation, specification and implementation of multi-agent real-time systems. The approach is based on the notion of concurrent object-oriented systems where processes are represented as objects. This is a highly suitable base for extension to distributed AI and multi-agent application platforms. In his approach, the behaviour of an agent (its safety, properties and time requirements) is declaratively stated as a set of temporal constraints among events which provides great advantages in writing multi-agent systems and manipulating them while preserving correctness. The temporal constraints have a procedural interpretation that allows them to be executed, also concurrently. In this way the specification of an agent behavior is directly executed thus eliminating the need to verify that the implementation satisfies its specification. The approach also proves a framework in which algorithms for a variety of concurrent programming paradigms may be expressed, compared and manipulated, and can be used as the basis for a development methodology for multi-agent real-time systems