AF-APL - Bridging Principles and Practice in Agent Oriented Languages

For AOP (Agent Oriented Programming) to become a mature discipline, lessons must be learned from practical language implementations. We present AF-APL (AgentFactory Agent Programming Language) as an Agent Oriented Programming Language that has matured with continued revisions and implementations, resulting in a language which, although based on the more theoretical aspects of AO design has incorporated many of the practical considerations of programming real world agents. We describe AF-APL informally, focusing on its experience driven features, such as commitment reasoning, a rich plan operator set, and an inherent asynchronous design. We present the default execution cycle for the AF-APL interpreter, looking in detail at the Commitment Management model. This model provides an agent with power to reason about its own actions, while maintaining basic constraints on computational tractability. In our development of the language, we learned many lessons that are not covered in the purer AO language definitions. Before concluding, we discuss a number of these lessons.