Using Multi-context Systems to Engineer Executable Agents

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 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 provides a first attempt to address this shortcoming; we propose 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 with an example architecture capable of argumentation-based negotiation.