Formal Agent Development: Framework to System

Much work in the field of agent-based systems has tended to focus on either the development of practical applications of agent systems on the one hand, or the development of sophisticated logics for reasoning about agent systems on the other. Our own view is that work on formal models of agent-based systems are valuable inasmuch as they contribute to a fundamental goal of computing of practical agent development. In an ongoing project that has been running for several years, we have sought to do exactly that through the development of a formal framework that provides a conceptual infrastructure for the analysis and modelling of agents and multi-agent systems on the one hand, and enables implemented and deployed systems to be evaluated and compared on the other. In this paper, we describe our research programme, review its achievements to date, and suggest directions for the future.