A common formal model of cooperating intelligent agents

The goal of ModelAge is to establish a common formal model
of the concept of agent ,
usable across a wide number of fields of Information Technology, where its
importance is now appearing:

• Requirements Engineering
  
• Organizational Models
  
• Software Design
  
• Artificial Intelligence: Specially, Distributed Artificial Intelligence
  
• Data Bases: Federative Databases
  

In each of these fields, the key facets of an agent appear to be:

• goals: each agent is trying to achieve through cooperation a precise objective
  under given constraints.
  
• beliefs: agents have an internal, imperfect representation of the world (including the state of other agents), on which their decisions are based.
  
• behaviours: agents act, communicate and perceive, showing thus an external behaviour
  that often obeys normative rules.
  
• heterogeneity: agents may be software, hardware systems, individual humans or human organizations.
  

The collaborations already undertaken between members of ModelAge
make us believe
that a common model may be found.
To ensure precision, the model will be formal, i.e. mathematically described.
Examples of cross-fertilisations already explored by members of ModelAge
include the application of deontic logics, originally
designed to formalise human organisations, to software specification;
the introduction of the notion of behaviour and goals into data base theory;
the use of belief logics (also originally modelling humans)
in concurrent systems; the introduction of behaviour in software specification.
The many formalisms used in each
field could then be grounded
in this common semantic framework,
allowing an integrated multi-formalism approach.