Modelling intelligent agents for autonomic computing in the PNagent framework

Abstract

Petri nets have proven to be a valuable tool for modelling concurrent systems. As such, they should be suitable for modelling agent and multi-agent systems, as these are inherently concurrent. Nevertheless, there are not many systems that allow the modelling of the whole multi-agent system in Petri nets. The use of Petri nets is usually limited to subproblems such as the verification of interaction protocols. This paper describes the main concepts of PNagent – a tool for modelling Believe-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents using the formalism of Object-Oriented Petri Nets (OOPN). PNagent allows for developing, testing and running software agents in a consistent graphical environment. The framework is suitable for prototyping and experiments with both multi-agent applications and the particular agent architecture itself. At the same time, thanks to the formal nature of its underlying paradigm, it provides the means to verify an agent's properties. Thanks to its consistent environment and the high-level nature of the used formalism, the framework is also suitable for incorporating the ideas of autonomic computing.