From SMART to agent systems development

n order for agent-oriented software engineering to prove effective it must use principled notions of agents and enabling specification and reasoning, while still considering routes to practical implementation. This paper deals with the issue of individual agent specification and construction, departing from the conceptual basis provided by the smart agent framework. smart offers a descriptive specification of an agent architecture but omits consideration of issues relating to construction and control. In response, we introduce two new views to complement smart: a behavioural specification and a structural specification which, together, determine the components that make up an agent, and how they operate. In this way, we move from abstract agent system specification to practical implementation. These three aspects are combined to create an agent construction model, actsmart, which is then used to define the AgentSpeak(L) architecture in order to illustrate the application of actsmart.

Towards a Formalisation of Electronic Contracting Environments

The IST-CONTRACT project is in the process of creating an electronic contracting language. One of the goals of this language is that it has formal underpinnings, and formalizations at a number of levels have been created. One of the lowest levels, upon which the other levels are built is the normative level. At this level, we identify how contract clauses (modeled as norms) may evolve over time. In this paper, we describe this formalization, and show how we may associate various states with a norm throughout its lifecycle. We also show how more complex evaluations may be carried out over a norm, and conclude with an example showing the application of the framework over a contract and its associated norms.