Using Multi-context Systems to Engineer Executable Agents

In the area of agent-based computing there are many proposals for speciic 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 exe-cutable agents. This paper provides a rst attempt to address this shortcoming; we propose a general method of deening 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 .