Abstract. Software engineers continually strive to develop tools and techniques to manage the complexity that is inherent in software systems. In this article, we argue that intelligent agents and multi-agent systems are just such tools. We begin by reviewing what is meant by the term “agent”, and contrast agents with objects. We then go on to examine a number of prototype techniques proposed for engineering agent systems, including methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design, formal specification and verification methods for agent systems, and techniques for implementing agent specifications. 1

The architecture of a multi-agent system can naturally be viewed as an organised society of individuals (i.e., as a computational organisation). For this reason, we believe organisational abstractions should play a central role in the analysis and design of such systems. To this end, the concepts of agent roles and role models are increasingly being used to specify and design multi-agent systems. However, this is not the full picture. In t...

Multi-agent systems... In this paper we introduce three additional organisational concepts - organisational rules, organisational structures, and organisational patterns - and discuss why we believe they are necessary for the complete specification of computational organisations. In particular, we focus on the concept of organisational rules and introduce a formalism, based on temporal logic, to specify them. This formalism is then used to drive the definition of the organisational structure and the identification of the organisational patterns. Finally, the paper sketches some guidelines for a methodology for agent-oriented systems based on our expanded set of organisational abstractions.

The metaphors of autonomous agents and agent societies havethepotential to make a signi cant impact on the processes of analysis, design, and development of complex software systems on the Internet. In this chapter, we concentrate predominantly on agent societies, and show howwork on coordination models and technologies provides apowerful framework for the engineering of Internet-based, multi-agent systems. First, we introduce the concepts of agent, multi-agent system, and agent-oriented software engineering, and highlight the speci c issues that arise when we take the Internet as the environment thatagents inhabit. We thenprovide a brief survey of the state of the art in the area of agent-oriented methodologies, paying particular attention to the Gaia methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. Gaia was originally conceived for benevolent agents inhabiting closed systems. However, to broaden its scope, we show how insights from the area of coordination models can be incorporated in order to make it more suitable for developing Internet-based applications.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is an emerging paradigm within industry that offers much potential of the management of the increasing levels of complexity inherent within modern software systems. For this paradigm to gain widespread acceptance, it is vital that we develop comprehensive frameworks that support the development and deployment of agent-oriented applications. This thesis contributes to this through the development of a four-tier development framework entitled the Agent Factory System. This framework combines an agent programming language that is founded upon a formal agent theory of commitment; a run-time environment that delivers a set of services that support the deployment of agent-oriented applications written in this programming language; an integrated development environment that delivers a toolkit that supports the development of these applications; and a development methodology that promotes a structure approach to the use of this toolkit. Finally, we evaluate the Agent Factory System from the context of various real-world

Endowing agents with “social rationality ” [10, 12, 11] can aid overall efficiency in tasks where cooperation is beneficial to system level performance. However it is difficult to maintain this beneficial effect in open and unpredictable systems. Such systems seem to require a “bespoke ” design for cooperation in each domain. Recent work in artificial life and biological sciences has identified novel “tag ” mechanisms for the spontaneous selforganization of group level adaptations in populations of autonomous agents [2, 3, 13, 16]. We summarize these findings and identify a key application (in MAS) to which these mechanisms may be fruitfully applied. An intriguing aspect of these mechanisms is that (in certain circumstances) there is a negative scaling cost – that is, the more agents in a system the better and more quickly organized they become. Also, since the process is driven by individual (bounded) optimization, agents retain a high degree of autonomy but still evolve behaviors that are socially rational even in open systems. Initial results indicate that the harnessing of such a process in MAS may be a viable alternative to the engineering of specific cooperation mechanisms and group structures.

With the promise of agent-based systems, a variety of research/industrial groups are developing autonomous, heterogeneous agents, that are distributed over a variety of platforms and environments in cyberspace. Rapid integration of such distributed, heterogeneous agents would enable software to be rapidly developed to address large-scale problems of interest. Unfortunately, rapid and robust integration remains a difficult challenge. To address this

With the proliferation of software agents and smart hardware devices there is a growing realization that large-scale problems can be addressed by integration of such standalone systems. This has led to an increasing interest in integration architectures that enable a heterogeneous variety of agents and humans to work together. These agents and humans differ in their capabilities, preferences, the level of autonomy they are willing to grant the integration architecture and their information requirements and performance. The challenge in coordinating such a diverse agent set is that potentially a large number of domain-specific and agentspecific coordination plans may be required. We present a novel two-tiered approach to address this coordination problem. We first provide the integration architecture with general purpose teamwork coordination capabilities, but then enable adaptation of such capabilities for the needs or requirements of specific individuals. A key novel aspect of this adaptation is that it takes place in the context of other heterogeneous team members. We are realizing this approach in an implemented distributed agent integration architecture called Teamcore. Experimental results from two different domains are presented. 1

In the area of agent-based computing there are many proposals for specific system architectures, and a number of proposals for general approaches to building agents. As yet, however, there are comparatively few attempts to relate these together, and even fewer attempts to provide methodologies which relate designs to architectures and then to executable agents. This paper provides a first attempt to address this shortcoming. We propose a general method of specifying logic-based agents, which is based on the use of multi-context systems, and give examples of its use. The resulting specifications can be directly executed, and we discuss an implementation which makes this direct execution possible.