Because Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have limited perception and communication capabilities, designing efficient AUV flotillas is challenging. Existing solutions are often strongly related to (1) a specific kind of mission and (2) the nature of the considered AUVs. So, it is difficult to reuse these approaches when switching to another mission context. This paper proposes a generic multi-agent based layered architecture for designing and specifying AUV flotillas at a high level of abstraction, regardless of the AUVs characteristics and skills. To this end, an organizational model is used to ease and regulate interactions between heterogeneous AUVs and combined with a behavioral reactive approach for limiting communication.

A reflective actor language that is used as a development tool for implementing distributed artificial intelligence systems is described. The MERING IV language is bound on the actor model of computation, which allows for autonomy and concurrency. MERING IV is a reflective language, i.e., a language that can represent itself, both structurally and operationally. MERING IV implements a model of reflection called compilation-based reflection. Reflection in MERING IV is used as a glueing mechanism that permits agents of various sizes and intelligences to communicate in a uniform manner. An example of the use of reflection for describing transparent protocols between agents is given.>

This paper describes various models of computational reflection in class based object oriented language. Two different approaches are covered: the meta-object approach which supposes that every object can have a meta-object describing and monitoring its behavior, and the message reification approach which describes a message as an object. The meta-object approach is discussed more fully showing that it is important to differentiate between structural reflection and computational reflection. We will see that, whereas classes and metaclasses are very important for the former, they cannot cope adequately with the later. Therefore we introduce a model of computational reflection where meta-objects are instances of a class META-OBJECT or of one of its subclasses.