. The notion of society should play a central role in agent-oriented software engineering as a first-class abstraction around which complex systems can be designed and built as multi-agent systems. We argue that an effective agentoriented methodology should account for inter-agent aspects by providing engineers with specific abstractions and tools for the analysis and design of agent societies and agent environments. In this paper, we outline the SODA agent-oriented methodology for the analysis and design of Internet-based systems. Based on the core notion of task, SODA promotes the separation of individual and social issues, and focuses on the social aspects of agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, SODA allow the agent environment to be explicitly modelled and mapped onto suitably-defined agent infrastructures. 1

Logic-based languages have alredy proved to be effective to build individual agents and to enable inter-agent communication in multi-agent systems. Also, logic tuple centres have shown that logic-based languages can be effectively exploited to rule inter-agent communication so as to build social behaviours. In this paper, we formally define the notion of logic tuple centre as well as the operational semantics of the logic-based language ReSpecT for the behaviour specification of logic tuple centres. For this purpose, we exploit a formal framework for asynchronous systems allowing coordination media to be represented in a separate and independent way with respect to the coordinated entities. As a by-product, this shows that a logic-based approach may be effectively exploited for the coordination of heterogeneous agents of different sorts and technologies.

. Coordination and access control are related issues in open distributed agent systems, being both concerned with governing interaction between agents and resources. In particular, while coordination deals with enabling interaction and making it fruitful, access control is meant to control interaction to make it harmless. We argue that this twofold facet has to be supported by a system in a uniform and decentralised manner. To this end, we describe how the application of the TuCSoN tuple-based coordination model over a hierarchical topology is well-suited in this context. On the one hand, policies can be enforced by means of a single mechanism based on tuples and can be scoped to manage access to groups of distributed resources. On the other hand, agents can interact along a hierarchical infrastructure by applying a standard tuple-based communication template. This makes TuCSoN a single coherent framework for the design and development of Internet-based multiagent systems, which takes coordination as the basis for dealing with network topology and access control in a uniform way. 1

. The design and development of cooperative Internet applications based on mobile agents require appropriate modelling of both the physical space where agents roam and the conceptual space of mobile agent interaction. The paper discusses how an open, Internet-based, organisation network can be modelled as a hierarchical collection of locality domains, where agents can dynamically acquire information about resource location and availability according to their permissions. It also analyses the issue of how agent motion can be ruled and constrained within a structured environment by means of an appropriate coordination infrastructure. 1 Introduction Mobile agents are a promising technology for the design and development of cooperative applications on the Internet [3, 5, 12, 13]. Due to their capability of autonomously roaming the Internet, mobile agents can move locally to the resources they need -- let them be users, data, or services -- and there interact with them. This can p...

Internet-based multi-agent systems call for new metaphors, abstractions, methodologies and enabling techologies specifically tailored to agent-oriented engineering. While coordination models define the framework to manage the space of agent interaction, ruling social behaviours and accomplishing social tasks, their impact on system design and development calls for an effective coordination technology. This paper presents LuCe, a coordination technology that integrates Java, Prolog and the notion of logic tuple centre, a programmable coordination medium, into a coherent framework. The power of the LuCe coordination technology is first discussed in general, then shown in the context of a simple yet significant system: a TicTacToe game among intelligent software agents and human players on the Internet.

We argue that the coming of the Internet era has raised issues that traditional object-oriented software engineering methodologies seem not ready to address. In this paper, we first discuss the intrinsic limitations of the object abstraction in the engineering of complex software systems, and compare it to the agent abstraction. Then, we show how an agent-oriented methodology should take into account interagent aspects such as the modelling of agent societies and of the agent space, by providing engineers with specific, ad hoc abstractions and tools. To this purpose, we introduce the SODA agent-oriented methodology for the analysis and design of Internet-based systems. SODA supplies the abstractions and procedures for engineering agent societies as well as the agent environment, including social infrastructures. The main idea in SODA is to exploit coordination models, languages, and infrastructures to address social issues. In particular, SODA shows how to choose a coordination mode...

The notion of agent coordination context has been introduced as a means to model and shape the space of agent interaction and communication, and the agent presence in a situated environment. This paper describes experiments in modelling and developing the notion of agent coordination context within the TuCSoN model for agent coordination, and discusses the related benefits in terms of the engineering of multiagent system organisation and integration with service-oriented infrastructures.

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The underlying connection topology between agents in a multi-agent system (MAS) has a decisive inuence in the local and global behavior of the system and, therefore, it affects the measure of the eciency of the MAS at developing a speci c task.