A promising technology towards the design and development of systems of such domains is agent based systems. Agents, having a knowledge component, act and interact with other agents and information sources in order to achieve some goals. Platforms intended for supporting the development of such systems should offer a number of features, including communication, concurrency, mobility, high level data structures, object orientation etc.

This book describes the design and implementation of such a language platform called April++ and its use on a number of applications. Methodologically, in designing and implementing the language, a layered approach has been adopted. April++ has been developed as a series of macro defined layers on top of the relatively primitive features of a pre-existing language called April.

On top of April++, an agent layer has been built (as a set of pre-defined classes) for constructing agent based systems. This layer has been customised for specific application domains considered. This includes a mobile agent application, a distributed database application and a network management one.

Contents:

• Introduction:
• Background Material
• The Building Blocks
• The April++ Language:
• AprilO: Adding Objects to April
• AprilQ: The Database Extension
• April++: Objects with Knowledge Base State
• The Implementation of April++
• The Applications:
• Component Based Agent Construction
• An Agent for Multi-Service Network Management
• Epilogue