---
title: "Analysis of Inheritance Mechanisms in Agent-Oriented Programming"
authors:
  - "Lobel Crnogorac"
  - "Anand S. Rao"
  - "Kotagiri Ramamohanarao"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/95"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/0095.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1997
pages: "647-653"
track: "Distributed Artificial Intelligence"
keywords:
---

# Analysis of Inheritance Mechanisms in Agent-Oriented Programming

Lobel Crnogorac, Anand S. Rao, Kotagiri Ramamohanarao

*Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 647-653.

## Abstract

Research into the design methodologies for agent-oriented programming (AOP) is still in its infancy, with most of the work focused towards applying the well-known object-oriented concepts. Integration of inheritance into AOP seems a natural step in that direction. This paper addresses the notion of inheritance in AOP. We identify and formally define two problems which significantly reduce the usefulness of inheritance. We present a formal framework to investigate the notion of inheritance and the above problems. We define two alternative inheritance mechanisms for AOP and formally show the trade-offs involved. We hope that the results obtained from the analysis will help AOP language designers in their search for better inheritance mechanisms and a successful integration of inheritance within AOP.