Reasoning about inheritance and cloning behaviors of software agents

With agents being a kind of restricted intelligent object, it is a natural way to research the inheritance feature of software agents and integrate inheritance mechanisms into AOP. Based on BDI models of agents, the paper addresses the semantics of static inheritance and dynamic inheritance of agents. For static inheritance, the semantics are discussed from two perspectives: single inheritance and multiple inheritance. For dynamic inheritance, we identify and formally classify dynamic cloning behaviors of agent instances into four types: function split, logic split, preference split and retrogress split.