Erlang as an implementation platform for BDI languages

Abstract

In this paper we report on our experiences using Erlang to implement a subset of the agent-oriented programming language Jason. The principal existing implementation of Jason is written in Java, but suffers from a number of drawbacks, i.e., has severe limitations concerning the number of agents that can execute in parallel. Basing a Jason implementation on Erlang itself has the potential of improving such aspects of the resulting multi-agent platform. To evaluate Erlang as a programming language implementation platform the paper describes our experiences in mapping Jason to Erlang, highlighting the positive and negative aspects of Erlang for this task. Moreover, the paper contains a number of benchmarks to evaluate the quantitative aspects of the resulting Jason implementation, especially with respect to support large multi-agent systems.