An Agent Design Method Promoting Separation Between Computation and Coordination

摘要

The development of (internet) agents is often a tedious and error-prone task resulting in poorly reusable designs, since both the internal computation of the agent as well as the coordination support are developed in an ad hoc fashion. To improve the process of agent-oriented software development, we propose an agent design method that imposes the separation of internal computation from coordination aspects. This method comprises two dimensions: a design formalism and an agent design process. As an illustration of the presented method, we present the design of an internet agent that is entitled to deploy a distributed service in a computer network, without breaking the consistency of that network. The presented design method has resulted in the development of ACF (Agent Composition Framework), a component framework to build flexible internet agents. We argue that the presented design method combined with this infrastructure can promote a modular and easy to manage approach to the design and development of internet agent applications.