ion Jean-Pierre BRIOT & Pierre COINTE LITP - Universit'e Paris-VI & Rank Xerox France 4, place Jussieu & 12, place de l'Iris 75005 Paris & 92071 La D'efense briot@litp.ibp.fr & pc@litp.ibp.fr in Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'87), Vol. 1, pages 40--43, August 1987. Abstract One of the main goals of object-oriented languages (OOLs) is to unify their universe: "every entity of the language is an object." The class concept, however, usually does not follow this wish: a class being not a real object, i.e., created from a class. The metaclass concept introduced in Smalltalk-80, attempts to give classes a first class citizenship but complicates the instantiation scheme without solving its fundamental limitations: the only partial specification of the class at the metaclass level, and the fixed number of meta-levels. Some more recent approaches, as in Loops and then CommonLoops, tend towards a better unification, but reveal the s...

This paper presents a hybrid multi-agent architecture called MAGIQUE. The aim of this architecture is to take advantage of both blackboard systems and autonomous agents. Our model contains several hierarchical control levels. It allows users modeling complex applications that involve interactions of sets of agents. For example in a multi-expert system, we can have a level for each logic used for deduction specialized in the communication between agents of a group. The paper describes the model and specify functionalities of two kinds of agents: specialists, and supervisors. Specialists hold expertise knowledge and are specialized in solving specific tasks, whereas supervisors coordinate interactions between a group of agents which are described by their mental attitudes (beliefs and goals). At the end of this paper, we shows also an example of application we are realized with MAGIQUE. We conclude by indicating the future application areas, particularly the robotics.

This paper presents a new architecture model, called MAGIQUE 1 , for building complex multi-agent systems. The aim of this architecture is to take advantage of both blackboard systems and autonomous agents. The model presented contains several hierarchical control levels. The paper describes the architecture and specify functionalities of two kinds of agents : specialists, and supervisors. Specialists hold expertise knowledge and are specialized in solving specific task, whereas supervisors coordinate interactions between a group of agents which are described by their mental attitudes (beliefs and goals). The supervisor can be viewed as a framework for cooperation among a set of specialists. It plays the role of blackboard which is used by the specialits to communicate each other. At the end of this paper, we shows how we are applied MAGIQUE to simulate a robot moving in an industrial environment. The application illustrates the cooperation of a set of supervisors in planning the rob...

This paper presents a hybrid and hierarchical multi-agent architecture model named MAGIQUE. The aim of this architecture is to take advantage of both blackboard system and autonomous agents. Our model has a hierarchical structure containing several control levels. it allows users modeling of complex applications that support interaction of sets of agents. For example in a multi-expert systems, we can have a level for each logic used for deduction specialized in the communication between its group's agents. Our paper is in three parts. The first one describes the model and specifies functionalities of two kinds of agents: specialists, and supervisors. Supervisors coordinate interactions between a group of agents which are described by their mental attitudes (beliefs, goals and intentions). The second part examines the properties of an agent. These properties describe both a model of cooperation and interaction of sets of agents. In the last part, a comparison between MAGIQUE and blackbo...

Many Object-Oriented Programming Languages provide reflective features which may be used to control the interpretive mechanism of the language. Often, these features are defined with respect to a golden braid consisting of objects, classes and metaclasses. This paper describes the Smalltalk golden braid and generalize it for multiple inheritance. Multiple inheritance leads to choices between many different inheritance strategies. The reflective features of Smalltalk cannot affect the basic mechanisms of inheritance and so an arbitrary choice must be made for multiple inheritance. A language is described in which the reflective features of Smalltalk are extended so as to allow programmer defined inheritance strategies. 2 Introduction The evaluation of a programming language expression e in a given context c may be described by the evaluation of a program p which takes a representation of e and c as input. e is termed an object-level construct whilst p and the representations of e and ...