From Active Objects to Autonomous Agents Submitted to Ieee Concurrency -special Series on Actors & Agents

This paper studies how to extend the concept of active objects into a structure of agents. It rst discusses the requirements for autonomous agents that are not covered by simple active objects. We propose then the extension of the single behavior of an active object into a set of behaviors with a meta-behavior scheduling their activities. To make a concrete proposal based on these ideas we describe how we extended a framework of active objects, named Actalk, into a generic multi-agent platform, named DIMA. We discuss how this extension has been implemented. We nally report on one application of DIMA to simulate economic models.