ConstraintAgentSpeak: an extension of the Agent Specification Language - AgentSpeak(L)

The design of complex agent-based systems requires the use of expressive high-level specification languages which eventually translate into efficient implementations. This thesis suggests that constraint-based agent specification is one of the approaches that meet these requirements. To support this assertion, this thesis presents an augmentation of the BDI agent programming language AgentSpeak(L) [Rao, 1996] with constraints and describes an implementation of an interpreter for the proposed agent specification language. The proposed language, called ConstraintAgentSpeak, improves over AgentSpeak(L) in a manner parallel to the gains achieved by integrating constraints in a logic programming framework to obtain constraint logic programming [Jaffar, 1986], in terms of both expressivity and efficiency. A preliminary observation on BDI agent architecture and constrain-based reasoning is given in chapter 2. Other chapters of this thesis present the following discussions on ConstraintAgentSpeak.