Blackboard- and Object-Based Systems via Multi-Head Clauses

Abstract

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 behaviour 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.