Agent Specification Using Multi-context Systems

In the area of agent-based computing there are many proposals for specific system architectures, and a number of proposals for general approaches to building agents. As yet, however, there are comparatively few attempts to relate these together, and even fewer attempts to provide methodologies which relate designs to architectures and then to executable agents. This paper discusses an attempt we have made to address this shortcoming, describing a general method of defining architectures for logic-based agents which can be directly executed. Our approach is based upon the use of multi-context systems and we illustrate its use through examples of the specification of some simple agents.