TI An Object-Oriented Framework for Modeling Cooperation in
Multi-Agent Rule-Based Development Environments 

LT CUCS-017-90 

OR COLUM 

YR 1990 

AU N. S. Barghouti 

AU G. E. Kaiser 

AV ftp cs.columbia.edu:pubreportsreports-1990cucs-017-90.ps.Z 

AB Rule-Based Development Environments (RBDEs) exploit expert
systems via rule-based modeling of the software development
process.  RBDEs store the software artifacts in a project
database, and define each software development activity that
manipulates these artifacts as a rule.  Opportunistic forward and
backward chaining on the rules automates some of chores that
developers would have otherwise done manually and ensures
consistency in the database.  Existing RBDEs do not scale up to
real software development projects involving large teams of
developers, in part because the current expert system paradigm
does not handle multiple agents sharing the working memory of the
rule system. In this article, we investigate the scaling up of
RBDEs through the use of an object-oriented framework that
integrates the structural and behavioral aspects of data modeling
and rule-based process modeling.  We use this framework to
support both consistency maintenance and cooperation in
multi-agent RBDEs.