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Brahms is a set of software tools to develop and simulate multi-agent models of human and machine behavior. Brahms was originally developed to analyze or design human organizations and work processes. Brahms is a full-fledged multi-agent, rule-based, activity programming language. It has similarities to belief-desire-and-intention (BDI) architectures and other agent-oriented languages, but is based on a theory of work practice and situated cognition. The Brahms language allows for the representation of situated activities of agents in a geographical model of the world. Situated activities are actions that happen in the context of a specific situation, thus their execution is constraint not only by the reasoning capabilities of an agent, but also by the agent’s beliefs of the external world, such as where the agent is located, the state of the world at that location and elsewhere, located artifacts, activities of other agents, communication with other agents and artifacts, et cetera. The objective of Brahms is to allow the representation of people’s collaboration, “off task” behaviors, multi-tasking, interrupted and resumed activities, informal interactions and knowledge, all the while being located in an environment. We refer to this situated behavior of people and artifacts as the work practice of an organization.

The Brahms agent language can also be used to develop executable software agents that are based on models of situated behavior. This allows for the development of “intelligent” agents that can act and react to specific situations that occur during its execution, and that have been modeled as the agent’s activity-behavior.

It is important to realize that any Brahms program is a computer model, and thus it is a representation of the world as understood by the Brahms modeler. There should never be a misunderstanding that Brahms agents are in the same sense intelligent as humans are intelligent. Brahms agents can be representations of certain observed human behaviors that have been codified by the Brahms modeler, but they can never be seen as possessing human intelligence or knowledge.

Brahms consists of a number of integrated software tools:

The compiler – the compiler parses a Brahms program (also referred to as a Brahms model).
The virtual machine (VM) – the VM loads and executes a compiled model program.
The Composer – the Composer is a Brahms integrated development environment integrating graphical model designers, source code editors, the compiler and the virtual machine.
The Agent Viewer – the Agent Viewer parses a Brahms runtime history event file into a MySQL database, and allows an end-user to view an agent’s activity timeline, as well as agent-to-agent communication interactions and movement.
The Java application interface – the JAPI is a library of Java API methods to develop a seamless integration of Brahms agents with software components written in other programming languages, such as Java.