Infrastructure Support for Agent-Based Development

As the field of agent-based computing has continued to develop, there have been several contributions to its theoretical underpinnings, and several others to supporting the efforts of practical systems development. Yet the connection between the two has been limited at best. In this paper we aim to address these limitations through a consideration of appropriate agent infrastructure that can support principled development of agent systems based on a strong conceptual framework. As well as a general discussion of infrastructure requirements in this context, we also describe the Paradigma implementation environment, based on the smart agent framework, which represents our initial efforts in this direction.