What Does It Mean to Have an Architecture?

Abstract

In this chapter, I propose an approach to architectures, which makes precise exactly what it means for an agent to 'have' an architecture, and allows us to establish properties of an agent expressed in terms of its architectural description. Using this approach, it is possible to verify whether two different agent programmes really have the same architecture or the same properties, allowing a more precise comparison of architectures and the agent programmes which implement them. I illustrate the approach with a number of examples which show both how to establish qualitative and quantitative properties of architectures and agent programmes, and how to establish whether a particular agent has a particular architecture. I focus on architectures of software agents, however, a similar approach can be applied to robots and other kinds of intelligent systems. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.