Agents for Concurrent Programming

This paper aims to demonstrate that concepts from Distributed Artificial Intelligence are very useful to design concurrent systems. The BESA framework and the AOPOA methodology are introduced as tools to achieve this goal. The Behavior-oriented, Event-driven and Social-based Agent (BESA) framework combines the concepts of MultiAgent Systems with the design of concurrent systems: an agent can be constructed as a set of behaviors; the notion of behaviors can be directly applied to concurrent systems design using the Agent Oriented Programming paradigm. The internal architecture of a BESA agent integrates two important features: a modular composition of behaviors and an event dispatcher based in a select like mechanism. The Agent Oriented Programming based in an Organizational Approach (AOPOA) methodology provides a systematic procedure to build complex system based in three concepts: a hierarchical recursive decomposition of the system, a goal-oriented role identification, and an evolution of the cooperation relationships linking the system components.