=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Towards a Jason Infrastructure for Soccer Playing Agents
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1032/paper-25.pdf
|volume=Vol-1032
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/csp/MitrovicIB13
}}
==Towards a Jason Infrastructure for Soccer Playing Agents==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1032/paper-25.pdf
Towards a Jason Infrastructure for
Soccer Playing Agents?
Extended Abstract
Dejan Mitrović1 , Mirjana Ivanović1 , and Hans-Dieter Burkhard2
1
Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Sciences,
University of Novi Sad, Serbia
{dejan, mira}@dmi.uns.ac.rs
2
Humboldt University, Institute of Informatics,
Rudower Chaussee 25, D-12489 Berlin, Germany
hdb@informatik.hu-berlin.de
Abstract. AgentSpeak and its practical interpreter Jason represent an
excellent framework for implementing complex, reasoning agents. This
paper discusses an ongoing research dedicated to extending Jason with
the support for soccer playing agents. The end goal is to design an ef-
ficient infrastructure, capable of deploying and running BDI agents in
the RoboCup soccer simulation league.
1 Intelligent agents playing soccer
RoboCup is an annual, internationally-recognized competition of football/soccer
playing robots [5]. By providing a formidable challenge in a fun environment, its
main goal is to support and further motivate the development of various artificial
intelligence techniques.
Many concepts of the multi-agent technology, including autonomy, pro-active
behaviour, coordination and cooperation, fit naturally into requirements of the
RoboCup competition. These concepts are directly supported by the complex,
Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI ) agent architecture [6]. The BDI architecture has
a strong mathematical basis and is widely supported by a number of agent
development frameworks [2]. Our previous work on deploying BDI agents in
RoboCup simulations [4] was based on the agent-oriented programming language
AgentSpeak and its accompanying interpreter Jason [1]. The main reasons Jason
was selected as for this task include its direct support for BDI , and a high level
of customizability.
By analyzing the inner workings of Jason and the simulator, it was concluded
that both systems support agents that operate in sense-think-act cycles. This
fact simplifies the integration process significantly. To deploy Jason agents, it
?
This work was partially supported by Ministry of Education, Science and Tech-
nological Development of the Republic of Serbia, through project no. OI174023:
”Intelligent techniques and their integration into wide-spectrum decision support”
Towards a Jason Infrastructure for Soccer Playing Agents 295
is sufficient to extend and modify the following set of the interpreter’s sub-
components:
– Simulated environment: a model of the game that enables the agents to sense
their surroundings, and act accordingly. The environment was extended with
custom parser and generator components which, respectively, extract agent’s
belief literals from the simulator’s set of percepts, and transform agent ac-
tions into concrete effectors;
– Execution control : handles Jason reasoning cycles. Development of a custom
execution control was necessary for several reasons, including the support for
key-framed motions. Key-framed motions often span across multiple Jason
reasoning cycles. The execution control assures that the appropriate sets of
commands are sent to the simulator as the motion progresses;
– Agent architecture: a link between the simulated environment and the re-
maining components.
Our custom implementation of these components was evaluated using a con-
crete implementation of a soccer playing agent [4]. The results have shown that
Jason is perfectly capable of satisfying strict time constraints imposed by the
official RoboCup simulator. However, further improvements and extensions are
needed in order to implement and deploy agents that exhibit more complex be-
haviour. Our ongoing work is dedicated to designing and re-implementing the
remaining parts of the Jason infrastructure [1]. This step is necessary in order
to fully integrate Jason into the RoboCup simulator, allowing Jason agents to
actually compete against other teams, and to do so by relying on extensively
researched and well-understood concepts and methodologies of the multi-agent
technology. In the long run, the plan is to further extend the infrastructure with
MOISE+, an advanced Jason-compatible framework for organizational mod-
elling that has already been tested in virtual soccer simulations [3].
References
1. Bordini, R.H., Hubner, J.F., Wooldridge, M.: Programming multi-agent systems in
AgentSpeak using Jason. Wiley Series in Agent Technology, John Wiley & Sons Ltd
(2007)
2. Bădică, C., Budimac, Z., Burkhard, H.D., Ivanović, M.: Software agents: Languages,
tools, platforms. Computer Science and Information Systems 8(2), 255–298 (2011)
3. Hubner, J.F., Sichman, J.S., Boissier, O.: Developing organised multiagent systems
using the moise+ model: programming issues at the system and agent levels. Inter-
national Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering 1(3/4), 370–395 (2007)
4. Mitrović, D., Ivanović, M., Burkhard, H.D.: Intelligent Jason agents in virtual soccer
simulations. In: Klusch, M., Thimm, M., Paprzycki, M. (eds.) Multiagent System
Technologies - 11th German Conference. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.
8076, pp. 334–345. Springer (2013)
5. RoboCup homepage. http://www.robocup.org/, retrieved on June 25, 2013
6. Wooldridge, M.J.: Reasoning about rational agents. Intelligent Robotics and Au-
tonomous Agents, The MIT Press (2000)