Inheritance by Extensions and Restrictions in Agent Systems

Agent-oriented programming is a new area which extends the object-oriented concepts of encapsulated objects with the notions of beliefs, desires, intentions, teams, conversations etc. Deening an inheritance mechanism which will combine all these diierent aspects of agent languages into a uniform methodology for code re-use is a challenge. In this paper we give two diierent methodologies for re-use of plan libraries in agent languages. The two approaches are compared with respect to their expressive power and their uniformity. It was found that the compositional approach presents a uniform view of inheritance and maximises code re-use.