Beyond prototyping in the factory of agents

Abstract

This paper introduces Agent Factory, a cohesive framework supporting a structured approach to the development and deployment of agent-oriented applications. We describe Agent Factory together with an accompanying agent development methodology. We detail the key attributes of Agent Factory, namely: visual design, design reuse, behaviour enactment, migration, and ubiquity. Agent Factory functionality is exercised by way of a case study. We offer cross comparison of our system with exemplar agent prototyping environments.