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PhD scholarship in Multi-Agent Systems (CS), Montpellier (France), Deadline: 30 May 2008

Ph.D Grant at the Montpellier Informatics Laboratory (LIRMM)

Title: Towards an agent oriented programming language
Laboratory : LIRMM- www.lirmm.fr <http://www.lirmm.fr>
Research Team : Kayou, http://www.lirmm.fr/kayou/
Supervisors : Dr. Abdelkader GOUAICH, Prof. Stefano A. CERRI
Contacts : gouaich@lirmm.fr <mailto:gouaich@lirmm.fr>, cerri@lirmm.fr
Duration: 3 years

How to candidate: Send an email to gouaich@lirmm.fr 
<mailto:gouaich@lirmm.fr> or cerri@lirmm.fr <mailto:cerri@lirmm.fr> with 
your CV.

Deadline for completing official application files: 30 MAI 2008

Thesis description:

The research question of this thesis is about facilitating the design the
 
implementation of flexible and autonomous embedded and communicating 
software systems by using the multi-agent systems (MAS) paradigm. In fact,
 
as a paradigm for building flexible distributed software systems, 
multi-agent systems (MAS) define some fundamental concepts such as: 
autonomous agent, environment, interaction and organization and this 
thesis suggest offering MAS design and implementation frameworks through a
 
domain specific language (DSL)


The state of art of agent oriented programming languages shows that few 
programming models specific to MAS have been proposed and most of existing
 
languages have been deeply inspired by dominant programming paradigms such
 
as logic programming and object-oriented programming. By reusing existing
 
programming paradigms, some of fundamental features of MAS are neglected 
or challenged. For instance, autonomy of agents is seriously challenged 
when working within object oriented or active objects frameworks.


Besides, concepts such as environment, organization, coordination and 
dialogues are not explicitly reified as first-class entities within the 
programming language. These facts contribute in deepening the gap between
 
the theoretical and conceptual MAS models and their implementations.


The approach proposed by this thesis is to explicitly reify fundamental 
concepts of MAS in an agent programming language. The programming process
 
can then be viewed as establishing an explicit dialog between a 
programmer, playing the role of a controller, and the software agent 
playing the role of an autonomous system to be controlled. This process
 
is interactive: the (human) programmer instructs the (artificial) agent 
how to behave in different situations; conversely the artificial agent 
reports to the human supervisor about its run time experiences.


The first stage of the thesis will establish the state of art of 
techniques and theories used for specification and implementation of MAS.
 
The second stage will propose an agent oriented programming language 
including its corresponding operational semantics. Finally, a third stage
 
will present an evaluation of the proposed framework through 
experimentation within the domain of embedded and networked systems.


Candidates interested by this thesis are kindly invited to send an email 
in order to submit the formal application documents and engage in the 
selection procedure.