Deliberative Evolution in Multi-Agent Systems

Evolution of automated systems, in particular evolution of automated agents based on agent deliberation, is the topic of this paper. Evolution is not a merely material process, it requires interaction within and between individuals, their environments and societies of agents. An architecture for an individual agent capable of (1) deliberation about the creation of new agents, and (2) (run-time) creation of a new agent on the basis of this, is presented. The agent architecture is based on an existing generic agent model, and includes explicit formal conceptual representations of both design structures of agents and (behavioural) properties of agents. The process of deliberation is based on an existing generic reasoning model of design. The architecture has been designed using the compositional development method DESIRE, and has been tested in a prototype implementation.