Declarative Agent Programming Support for a FIPA-Compliant Agent Platform

Multi-agent system(MAS) is a blooming research area, which exhibits a new paradigm for the design, modeling and implementation of complex systems. A significant amount of effort has been made in establishing standards for agent communication and MAS platforms. However, communication is not the only difficulty faced by agent researchers. Research is also directed towards the formal aspects of agents and declarative approaches to model agents. This paper explores the bonding between high-level reasoning engines and low-level agent platforms in the practical setting of using three formal agent reasoning implementations together with an existing agent platform, OPAL, that supports the FIPA standards. We focus our discussion in this paper on our approach to provide declarative agent programming support in connection with the OPAL platform, and show how declarative goals can be used to glue the internal micro agents together to form the hierarchical architecture of the platform.