Issues and Challenges in Building a Framework for Reactive Agent Systems

New tools and techniques are emerging to handle the complexities that might arise with the development of software systems. Reactive agent models are one such area that is emerging as a powerful paradigm in software engineering. This paper describes issues, trends, and approaches that exhibit the innovative characteristic of the reactive agent model and the design aspects of such a system. Engineering flexible agent systems has always been a challenging task. Development of such systems highlights the importance of formal specification methods. Descartes, an executable specification language, was taken into study with these complicated systems because of the importance of providing a satisfactory approach to software development. This approach enhances software development by providing a means of reduction of the gap between analysis and design. The paper concludes with proposed extensions to specification languages to support agent-based software engineering.