Research into the design methodologies for agent-oriented programming (AOP) is still in its infancy, with most of the work focused to-wards 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 alnguage designers in their search for better inheritance mechanisms and a successful integration of inheritance within AOP.
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