BESA: Behavior-Oriented, Event-Driven, Social-Based Agent Framework

This paper presents the BESA framework, which is intended to provide a flexible model that supports the design and implementation of MultiAgent Systems (MAS). The abstract model of BESA is based in three fundamental concepts: an event-driven control approach implementing a select like mechanism, a modular behavior-oriented agent architecture, and a social-based support for cooperation between agents. The fusion of these concepts into a parallel architecture is the main innovation of BESA. The BESA architecture is composed of three levels: agent level, social level and system level. The internal architecture of an agent integrates two important features: a modular composition of behaviors and an event selector mechanism. In the BESA abstract model, intermediate levels of abstraction are incorporated allowing to define and handle hierarchical organizations. An agent system implemented using the BESA architecture is seen as a distributed system composed of one or several BESA-containers. The main components of the BESA framework have been implemented using the Java language; its correct operation has been proven by building a multi-robot simulator.