1 Running head: RULE CONEPTS FOR BUILDING AGENT ARCHITECTURES Using Rule-Based Concepts as Foundation for Higher-Level Agent Architectures

Declarative programming using rules has advantages in certain application domains and has been successfully applied in many real world software projects. Besides building rule-based applications, rule concepts also provide a proven basis for the development of higher-level architectures, which enrich the existing production rule metaphor with further abstractions. One especially interesting application domain for this technology is the behavior specification of autonomous software agents, because rule bases help fulfilling key characteristics of agents such as reactivity and proactivity. In this chapter it will be detailed, which motivations promote the usage of rule bases for agent behavior control and what kinds of approaches exist. Concretely, these approaches will be explained in the context of four existing agent architectures (pure rule-based, AOP, Soar, BDI) and their implementations (Rule Responder, Agent-0 and successors, Soar, and Jadex). In particular, it will be emphasized in which respect these agent architectures make use of rules and with what mechanisms they extend the base functionality. Finally, the approaches will be generalized by summarizing their core assumptions and extension mechanisms and possible further application domains besides agent architectures will be presented