Declarative reflection tools for agent shells

This paper introduces declarative reflection schemata and describes implementation tools for it. The keywords are planning and inference, i.e. a declarative (nonprocedural) description of self must exist and be used for making inferences about the future activities of the reflective system and about consequences of these activities. The NUT system is used as a platform for intelligent agents with reflection. NUT processes running in a network are agent shells filled with knowledge in the form of NUT packages. A knowledge-based technique supported by automatic synthesis of programs is used for declarative reflection: a reflection schema with a model of self managed by daemons is implemented using run-time compilation/decompilation of classes and metaprogramming with productions.