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Dear Rui, First, apologies for the delay in replying, I was away with little internet access for a couple of weeks. Indeed your message led to an interesting discussion. Personally, I was delighted with your mention of using Jason, of course, and indeed the other agent programming languages and platforms you mentioned. There has been much progress on those recently, and I've very recently heard of quite a few people interested in using various different agent languages and platforms to develop simulations with agents that are more elaborate than what is typically obtained with agent-based simulation toolkits or with more suitable code than obtained by those who developed simulations programming in, say, C or Java. As Scott rightly pointed out, what is special about agent-based models is that it allows users to observe processes such as agents learning from each other, the emergence of social relations (as reflected, e.g., in an agent's "mind"), etc. Personally, I think you are in the right direction by using a cognitive agent architecture (with the support of a programming language tailored for that) to improve your model in the way you mentioned below. Obviously you might stumble across fancifully worded, but otherwise quite empty, criticism of BDI-based agent programming from people who have absolutely no alternative to offer you when it comes to programming complex agents, and indeed very little knowledge of what's going on in that research area. In any case you should be aware of that and I must also say that you are likely to find difficulties in this approach precisely because there isn't much past experience you will be able to rely upon. Another thing I should point out is that most agent programming languages aren't yet well equipped with constructs for some social aspects of multi-agent systems such as norms. If you make a final decision to use Jason, the best thing will be for you to use the Moise + organisational model by Hubner/Boissier/Sichman which has already been combined with Jason, see: http://moise.sourceforge.net/ Best of luck with your research, Rafael On 5 Jan 2007, at 16:47, Rui Lopes wrote: > Hi!, > > My name is Rui Lopes and I'm a M.Sc Student of Computer Science in > the University of Coimbra. I am working in ECoS, CISUC (http:// > cisuc.dei.uc.pt/ecos/) for one year and hale, ina project on > Models of Territorial Self-organisation - MATer (http:// > cisuc.dei.uc.pt/ecos/view_project.php?id_p=54). Now I am also > working on my dissertation on the Emergence and Propagation of > Norms and Beliefs and recently I have joined this list. The aim of > dissertation is to "upgrade" the simulation that results from MATer > with agents that recognize and reason about beliefs and norms to > study the emergence of norms and beliefs and how those propagate in > real world territories. > After some research I am decided to build BDI based agents. MATer > uses Repast and I'm thinking in use Jason or Jadex for the > reasoning of the agents. I have also looked at others like 3APL, > Jess, etc but they seem less appropriate. > I have read on several frameworks for modeling norms and beliefs, > but most of them are only theoretical models. I didn't understand > quite well if modal or deontic logic are an obligation in such a > system and if there are proper tools to embed this kind of > reasoning into a toolkit like repast. > I would appreciate some counseling on the toolkits/languages to use > on my simulation as also as references and readings on implemented > models of norms and beliefs. > > Thank you very much in advance, > Rui Lopes > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Rafael H. Bordini Department of Computer Science [log in to unmask] University of Durham http://www.dur.ac.uk/r.bordini South Road, Durham DH7 6TE, UK +44 191 334 1727 (phone) +44 191 334 1702 (fax)