C-BDI™ implements the BDI (Beliefs/Desires/Intentions) model of rational reasoning about actions – often referred to as Intelligent Software Agents or BDI Agents. C-BDI is designed for the autonomous systems and vehicles market, which requires the product to be certificated to appropriate development and safety standards. AOS’s existing JACK®  product is written in Java™ and consequently cannot be part of such a certificated system currently.  The ”C” in C-BDI stands for certifiable.

An initial demonstration version has been built by AOS in the C programming language, and is being evaluated by key users. The production C-BDI system is being built in the Ada language, to ensure that it meets the demanding standards required for autonomous and safety critical systems.

Why would C-BDI and its underlying Intelligent Software Agent concepts be of interest to an autonomous systems development engineer?

• Allows the level of software abstraction to be raised, from procedural programming to agent-oriented programming
• Provides a more natural way to model relationships between reasoning entities
• Makes it cost-effective to introduce decision-making capability in certificated systems
  • Based on the established Ada language, already accepted by the aerospace industry
  • Makes use of certificated compilers
  • Implements the BDI (Beliefs/Desires/Intentions) model in the Ada programming language
    
  • Will run on the major real-time operating systems, i.e. Greenhill Integrity, WindRiver VxWorks, QNX and RT-Linux.

C-BDI will be available in 2009.