Agent Architecture as Object Oriented Design

Improving the development of agent intelligence requires improving the mechanisms of that development. This paper explores the application of an established software methodology, object-oriented design, to agent development in two ways. We present a distributed agent architecture, Edmund, and describe first its own object-oriented structure. Then we relate the methodology for developing agent behaviors under Edmund. We explain how this methodology exploits key aspects of object-oriented design, particularly the development of the class hierarchy, as a prototype for agent design.