Towards a Formal Specification for the AgentComponent

In this paper we present the AgentComponent (AC) approach under formal aspects. A multi agent system (MAS) is composed of AC instances, where each AC instance consists of a knowledge base, storing the beliefs, of slots, storing the communication partners, of a set of ontologies, and of so-called ProcessComponents (PC) representing the behaviours an AC instance. An AC is a generic component that can be reused (instantiated ACs) and parametrized by customizing the communication partners (slots), the ontologies and the behaviours of an AC instance. The focus of this paper is to introduce the basic AC approach and to define a formal specification for this approach. In the first part we present an informal description of the AC approach and show how to construct a component-based MAS by a simple example. The second part of this paper presents a metamodel for the AC approach and provides a formal specification for the services of the generic AC.