Myworld: an Agent-oriented Testbed for Distributed Artificial Intelligence

Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new programming paradigm which proposes that mentalistic notions (such as belief, intention, commitment and so on) are useful abstraction mechanisms for describing complex, intelligent agents, and that they may therefore be used as a basis for programming such agents [17]. In this paper, we describe a Distributed Artificial Intelligence testbed called MYWORLD, in which individual agents are defined in terms of such notions. At run-time, a MYWORLD system contains a simulated world, containing a number of agents, (which are able to act in the world, for example by moving or communicating with other agents), and possibly other objects, with properties defined by the user. The organisation of MYWORLD and the agent-oriented programming language used are described in detail. A number of cooperation experiments performed with MYWORLD are also discussed. We conclude by outlining our plans for the next refinement of MYWORLD. ∗e-mail: [email protected], tel: (+44 61) 247 1531, fax: (+44 61) 247 1483.