Compositional Design and Reuse of a Generic Agent Model .

The term agent has become popular, and has been used for a wide variety of applications, ranging from simple batch jobs and simple email filters, to mobile applications, to intelligent assistants, and to large, open, complex, mission critical systems (such as systems for air traffic control). Some of the key concepts in agent technology lack universally accepted definitions. In particular, there is only partial agreement on what an agent is. For example, simple batch jobs are termed agent because they can be scheduled in advance to perform tasks on a remote machine, mobile applications are termed agent because they can move themselves from computer to computer, and intelligent assistants are termed agents because they present themselves to human users as believable characters that manifest intentionality and other aspects of a mental state normally attributed only to humans. Besides this variety in different appearances of agents, applications of agents often are concentrated on specific implementations of agents (often in Java). Often the only precise description of an agent is its implementation code, which is dependent on the chosen implementation platform. Therefore, existing agent architectures are often only comparable in an informal manner. A principled design description of an agent at a conceptual and logical level lacks, which makes it difficult to compare agents from different applications.