Abstract

An agent programming model can simply specify agent behaviors as proactive behaviors and reactive behaviors. Typically a multi-agents system is based on message passing, which usually is space and time coupled. This thesis aims at developing a multiple reactive tuple space coordination media that provides space and time decoupling for agent dynamic interaction. It provides three categories of primitives: (i) synchronous primitives, (ii) asynchronous primitives, and (iii) reactive primitives. The synchronous and asynchronous primitives are intended to support agent proactive behaviors. The reactive primitives are for supporting agent reactive behaviors. The formal specification of the reactive tuple space is also described based on the state machine model. In order to enhance system efficiency, a replication protocol is designed to accommodate both locality and concurrency of tuple accesses. The reactive tuple space has been fully implemented and integrated with the JADE mobile agent platform. Comparing with ACL message passing in JADE, experiments are conducted to show that the reactive tuple space can provide competitive performance in terms of interaction latency and bandwidth for tuple spaces of reasonable size.