Agent Class Methodology: a new kind of autonomous object generation methodology

We present a class based object oriented programming methodology, the Agent Class Methodology (ACM), a new kind of autonomous object generation methodology. The ACM specifies how to construct general purpose agents that can be used to construct a communicating, distributed, concurrent system. We explain the ACM's autonomous control mechanism together with the four-layered class inheritance architecture of agent class, and we also describe the features of agent class to demonstrate that the ACM meets with the basic features of object orientation. As shown by our application of ACM, the traditional object oriented programming technique can be promoted to an agent oriented counterpart by the use of ACM.