On the external concurrency of current BDI frameworks for MAS

Martina Baiardi, Samuele Burattini, Giovanni Ciatto, Danilo Pianini, Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Omicini

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems: 12th International Workshop, EMAS 2024

2024

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 their target domain's specific needs, 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 tend to hide them under the hood, making them opaque to the developer, and effectively limiting the possibility of fine-tuning the MAS.

keywords Agent-Oriented Programming, Concurrency, BDI Agents, Threading, Parallelism

reference talk

On the external concurrency of current BDI frameworks for MAS (EMAS 2024@AAMAS 2024, 06/05/2024) — Alessandro Ricci (Martina Baiardi, Samuele Burattini, Giovanni Ciatto, Danilo Pianini, Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Omicini)

origin event

EMAS 2024@AAMAS 2024

funding project

FAIR-PE01-SP08 — Future AI Research – Partenariato Esteso sull'Intelligenza Artificiale – Spoke 8 “Pervasive AI” (01/01/2023–31/12/2025)

ENGINES — ENGineering INtElligent Systems around intelligent agent technologies (28/09/2023–27/09/2025)

works as

reference publication for talk

On the external concurrency of current BDI frameworks for MAS (ENGINES Kick-off Meeting, 20/06/2024) — Giovanni Ciatto (Martina Baiardi, Samuele Burattini, Giovanni Ciatto, Danilo Pianini, Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Omicini)

superseding publication for

Concurrency Model of BDI Programming Frameworks: Why Should We Control It? (paper in proceedings, 2024) — Martina Baiardi, Samuele Burattini, Giovanni Ciatto, Danilo Pianini, Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Omicini