Analysis of Inheritance Mechanisms in Agent-Oriented Programming

Research into the design methodologies for agent-oriented programming (AOP) is still in its infancy, with most of the work focused towards applying the well-known object-oriented concepts. Integration of inheritance into AOP seems a natural step in that direction. This paper addresses the notion of inheritance in AOP.We identify and formally de ne two problems which signi cantly reduce the usefulness of inheritance. We present a formal framework to investigate the notion of inheritance and the above problems. We de ne two alternative inheritance mechanisms for AOP and formally show the trade-o s involved. We hope that the results obtained from the analysis will help AOP language designers in their search for better inheritance mechanisms and a successful integration of inheritance within AOP.