Programming Deliberative Agents for Mobile Services: The 3APL-M Platform

3APL-M is a platform for building deliberative multi-agent systems whose components execute on handheld and embedded computational devices. The solution takes advantage of the 3APL language and definitions, delivers a methodology for building Belief-Desire-Intention inference systems and provides an interface to integrate the applications to the external world. The library is distributed for the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) programming platform, which is widely adopted by the hardware manufactures and available for a myriad of mobile computing devices. The role of agent-based computing for mobile services is explained, the architecture and programming structures are presented and proof-of-concept applications are demonstrated.