Experiences in the Development of an Agent Architecture

Abstract

The current interest in agent-based software development has increased the demand for agent architectures upon which to build agent-based systems. While several agent architectures have been made publicly available, work in this area is not by any means finished—there are still many reasons to research new agent architectures. Although development of an agent architecture has been identified as a difficult process, little has been written about the issues involved—this contributes to the difficulty of the process. It is important for future agent architecture development that such issues be identified and widely discussed so that common pitfalls are not repeatedly encountered. This paper outlines the development of a new agent architecture and discusses experiences gained while using it to develop a prototype for the New Zealand Distributed Information Systems project. It is found that a useful agent architecture requires far more than a string-based peer-to-peer messaging platform to support effective agent-based software development.

The use of the term “agent architecture” refers to a software package that provides an agent platform, agent framework and associated agent-oriented tools for developing agent-based systems. This is not to be confused with an agent’s internal architecture which is a model of the internal components of an agent, for example the BDI architecture.