Take a step back. Do you really need to build something this abstract? If it's so abstract that you're unable to answer simple questions about how it should behave that's a good hint that it's too abstract to be useful.

Well-designed OO systems speak the language of their problem domain. Assuming the problems you're trying to solve don't involve "kernels" (of corn?) and "agents" (007?), you're probably heading too far into abstract implementation, in my opinion.

-sam