AOSDE: an agent-oriented software development environment

The basic goals of AOSDE are to provide an environment for constructing a software agent that can support distributed artificial intelligence systems. The agent model consists of three layers: virtual machine layer, logic layer and resource layer. The virtual machine layer is intended to be a general interface to environment which provides the agent' s communicative, sensoric and actoric links to outside world. The communicative part provides the functionality of sending messages to and receiving messages from other agents using Software Agent Communication Language (SACL) or another language. An agent can sense its environment through a sensoric part. Actors will carry out the physical actions the agent may perform. This layer provides a set of primitives to the upper layer, and so hide the difference of real machines. Through this layer the upper layers can run successfully without concerning the network, operating system, or hardware configuration. The logic layer is the core of the agent which separates it into two parts: agent kernel module and function modules. The resource layer is a set of resources, such as knowledge base, database, model base, image base and so on, which will be used by a special agent.