Adding Evolving Abilities to a Multi-Agent System

Abstract. This paper reports on a fertile marriage between madAgents, a Java and Prolog based multi-agent platform, and EVOLP, a logic programming based language to represent and reason about evolving knowledge. The resulting system, presented with a formal semantic characterisation and implemented using a combination of Java, XSB Prolog and Smodels, provides an improvement of madAgents, allowing for the implementation of a richer agent architecture where agents ’ beliefs and behavior, as well as their evolution, are specifiable in EVOLP. It inherits the merits of Answer Set Programming (e.g., default negation for reasoning about incomplete knowledge, a semantics based on multiple answer-sets for reasoning about several possible worlds, etc.) on top of which we add all the specific merits of EVOLP for specifying evolving knowl-edge. At he same time, the resulting system provides a proof of principle that EVOLP can easily be adopted by existing MAS, to represent an evolving belief base, or also to represent the agent’s evolving behavior.