Designing collaborative agents with eXAT

This paper describes eXAT, an experimental agent-programming platform, based on the Erlang language, designed by the authors. The platform provides an "all-in-one" framework for the design, with a single tool, of agent intelligence, agent behaviour and agent communication. This is made possible in eXAT by means of the integration of an Erlang-based expert system engine, together with an execution environment for agent behaviours based on object-oriented finite-state machines. Such a system allows transition triggering on the basis of agent\´s mental state. Similarly, the provided agent communication facility, which is based on the exchange of ACL speech acts, cannot only trigger behaviours but also influence agent\´s mental state according to FIPA-ACL semantics.