Advances in agent technology depend on improving frameworks for building and supporting agent societies. Experience suggests that first generation multi-agent systems fall short of providing a rapid prototyping development environment for the systematic construction and deployment of agent-oriented applications. While at least sixty [13] different agent systems have been implemented, few efforts have been made to use them as case studies for building second-generation multi-agent systems. We propose a refactoring of both architecture and implementation across the FIPAOS, JADE, and Zeus open-source agent frameworks to produce a new multi-agent system framework called MAS2. The first step is to extract reusable design elements for MAS2 beginning with the agent behavior subsystem. FIPAOS, JADE, and Zeus all have a core behavior subsystem that includes an execution process, ACL message interface, agent behavior engine, and corresponding primitive processing objects. These mechanisms are evaluated in this paper in the context of building a meeting scheduling protocol from which useful architectural elements and implementation techniques are identified Notes:
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