Designing and Implementing a Framework for BDI-Style Communicating Agents in Haskell

In this position paper we present the design and prototypical implementation of a framework for BDI-style agents defined as Haskell functions, supporting both the explicit representation of beliefs and backtracking (at the level of individual agents), and asynchronous communication via message passing. The communication layer is separated from the layers implementing the features of individual agents through different stacked monads, while beliefs are represented through atomic or structured values depending on the user’s needs. Our long-term goal is to develop a framework for purely functional BDI agents, which is currently missing, in order to take advantage of the features of the functional paradigm, combined with the flexibility of an agent-oriented approach.