The execution of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents in a Multi-Agent System (MAS) can be practically implemented on top of low-level concurrency mechanisms that impact on efficiency, determinism, and reproducibility. We argue that developers should specify the MAS behaviour independently of the execution model, and choose or configure the concurrency model later on, according to the specific needs of their target domain, leaving the MAS specification unaffected. We identify patterns for mapping the agent execution over the underlying concurrency abstractions, and investigate which concurrency models are supported by some of the most commonly used BDI platforms. Although most frameworks support multiple concurrency models, we find that they mostly hide them under the hood, making them opaque to the developer, and actually limiting the possibility of fine-tuning the MAS.
翻译:在多智能体系统(MAS)中,信念-愿望-意图(BDI)智能体的执行实际上可以通过底层并发机制实现,这些机制会影响效率、确定性和可复现性。我们认为,开发者应当独立于执行模型来规定MAS的行为,并根据目标领域的具体需求,在后续阶段选择或配置并发模型,同时保持MAS规范不受影响。我们识别了将智能体执行映射到底层并发抽象的模式,并考察了一些最常用的BDI平台所支持的并发模型。尽管大多数框架支持多种并发模型,但我们发现它们通常将这些模型隐藏在内部,对开发者而言是不透明的,这实际上限制了微调MAS的可能性。