Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to explore ways of describing agents in logical theories. The contribution is that the logical theories we build are a generalised form of logic programs. Like normal logic programs, these theories have an intuitive declarative reading and a procedural interpretation to guide the implementation of automatic devices and software. Both human beings and machines can reason about these logical theories. We employ the amalgamation of object and meta-logic programs to model notions such as beliefs, goals and agent's "mental" activities. But we also accommodate less usual notions such as reactivity, openness, activation of goals and preference encoding, that have proved to be essential in realistic models of agents. Four logic programming languages to program agent with those features are introduced. We use an event-based approach to model dynamic universes with changing properties, concurrency and synergistic effects.

Citations