eJason: An Implementation of Jason in Erlang

• Published in: Programming Multi-Agent Systems pp. 1 - 16
• Main Authors: Díaz, Álvaro Fernández, Earle, Clara Benac, Fredlund, Lars-Åke
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Belief Base; Illocutionary Force; Multiagent System; Plan Record; Related Intention
• ISBN: 3642386997; 9783642386992
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-38700-5_1

In this paper we describe eJason, a prototype implementation of Jason, the well-known agent-oriented programming language, in Erlang, a concurrent functional programming language. The reason for choosing Erlang as the implementation vehicle is the surprising number of similarities between Jason and Erlang, e.g., both have their syntactical roots in logic programming, and share an actor-based process and communication model. Moreover, the Erlang runtime system implements lightweight processes and fast message passing between processes. Thus, by mapping Jason agents and agent-to-agent communication onto Erlang processes and Erlang process-to-process communication, we can create a very high-performing Jason implementation, potentially capable of supporting up to a hundred thousand concurrent actors. In this paper we describe in detail the implementation of Jason in Erlang, and provide early feedback on the performance of the implementation.