Object-Process Methodology Applied to Agent Design

As computer systems become ever more complex, we need more powerful abstractions and metaphors to explain their operations. System development shows that designing and building agent systems is a difficult task, which is associated with building traditional distributed, concurrent systems. Understanding natural, artificial, and social systems requires a well-founded, yet intuitive methodology that is capable of modeling these complexities in a coherent, straightforward manner. Object-Process Methodology (OPM) is a system development and specification approach that combines the major system aspects (function, structure, and behavior), into an integrated single model. This paper will provide a paradigm for designing agent systems using the object-process methodology. It aims to identify design concepts, and to indicate how they interact