A Component Based Approach to Agent Specification

The Air Force, as well as all of industry, is currently faced with the problem of having to produce larger and more complex software systems that run efficiently and reliably as well as being extensible and maintainable. This research addresses this problem by developing a knowledge representation language that can be used to unambiguously specify and design software systems in a verifiable, efficient, and understandable manner. The language is a combination of object-oriented and component-based methodologies and makes use of both graphics and text to represent information. Although designed for the development of any type of software system, the language has been implemented in agent Tool, a multi-agent development environment.