Analysis of Inheritance Mechanisms in Agent-Oriented Programming

Research into the design methodologies for agent-oriented programming (AOP) is still in its infancy, with most of the work focused towards applying the well-known object-oriented concepts. Integration of inheritance into AOP seems a natural step in that direction. This paper addresses the notion of inheritance in AOP. We identify and formally define two problems which significantly reduce the usefulness of inheritance. We present a formal framework to investigate the notion of inheritance and the above problems. We define two alternative inheritance mechanisms for AOP and formally show the trade-offs involved. We hope that the results obtained from the analysis will help AOP language designers in their search for better inheritance mechanisms and a successful integration of inheritance within AOP. 1 Introduction Multi-agent systems are concurrent systems based on the notion of autonomous, reactive, internallymotivated agents interacting in a constantly changing environment. Resear..