Compositional Design and Reuse of a Generic Agent Model

This paper introduces a formally specified design of a compositional generic agent model (GAM). This agent model abstracts from specific application domains; it provides a unified formal definition of a model for weak agenthood. It can be (re)used as a template or pattern for a large variety of agent types and application domain types. The compositional development method DESIRE was used to design the agent model GAM at a conceptual and logical level. It serves as a unified, precisely defined coneptual structure which can be refined by specialisation and instantiation to a large variety of other, more specific agents. To illustrate reuse of this agent model, it is shown how GAM can be used to describe in a unified manner a large number of agent architectures from the literature.