Blackboard- and Object-based systems via multi-head clauses

This paper presents a distributed architecture supporting and integrating both blackboard- and object-based multi-agent models. The architecture is based on a concurrent logic language with multi-head clauses, committed-choice behavior and restricted AND parallelism. A blackboard-based application is mapped into a set of multi-head clauses representing logic agents which communicate via a. common (possibly distributed) working memory. Objects are clusters of processes, objects' state is represented by logical variables, message-passing communication between objects is performed via multi-head clauses and inheritance is obtained as union of clauses. Thanks to the parallel nature of the underlying concurrent language, we obtain a distributed implementation where parallelism is highly exploited