The agent component approach, combining agents, and components

Abstract. In this paper we introduce a new approach, the so-called AgentComponent (AC) approach which combines component and agent technology. A multi agent system (MAS) is composed of AC instances, each AC instance consists of a knowledge base, storing the beliefs of an AC instance, of slots, storing the communication partners of an AC in-stance, of a set of ontologies, that represent domain specific languages for certain contexts, and of so-called ProcessComponents (PC) represent-ing the behaviours of an AC instance. The AC is a generic component that can be reused (instantiated ACs) and parametrized by customizing the communication partners (slots), the ontologies and the behaviours (PCs) that can be added and removed from any AC instance. Hereby we achieve added value for agents and components. Agents can be eas-ily composed, customized and reused whereas components get enhanced communication and interaction facilities from agents. We present this approach in detail, show how to construct a component-based MAS by a simple example and present a graphical tool for composing systems of AgentComponents.