aSchool of Electronics and Computer Science,University of Southampton,

In order for agent-oriented software engineering to prove effective it must use princi-pled notions of agents and enabling specification and reasoning, while still consider-ing 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 spec-ification and a structural specification which, together, determine the components that make up an agent, and how they operate. In this way, we move from ab-stract 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.