Agent Engineering

Agent engineering concerns the development of autonomous computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating and delegating in a dynamic environment. It is one of the most promising areas of research and development in information technology, computer science and engineering.This book addresses some of the key issues in agent engineering: What is meant by ?autonomous agents?? How can we build agents with autonomy? What are the desirable capabilities of agents with respect to surviving (they will not die) and living (they will furthermore enjoy their being or existence)? How can agents cooperate among themselves? In order to achieve the optimal performance at the global level, how much optimization at the local, individual level and how much at the global level would be necessary?

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems, EMAS 2014, held in Paris, France, in May 2014. The 22 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The focus of the papers is on following topics: intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, software design engineering, model-driven software engineering, reasoning about belief and knowledge, cooperation and coordination, constraint and logic programming, software verification, design patterns.

In the ten years since the first MAAMAW was held in 1989, at King's College, Cambridge, the field of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has flourished. It has attracted an increasing amount of theoretical and applied research. During this decade, important efforts have been made to establish the scientific and technical foundations of MAS. MAAMAW publications are testimony to the progress achieved in key areas such as agent modelling and reasoning, multi-agent interaction and communication, and multi-agent organisation and social structure. Research results have covered a wide range of inter-related topics in each area including agent architectures, reasoning models, logics, conflict resolution, negotiation, resource allocation, load balancing, learning; social behaviour and interaction, languages and protocols, interagent and agent-human communication, social models, agent roles, norms and social laws, and static and dynamic organisational structures. The feasibility and the viability of the proposed models and techniques have been demonstrated through MAS applications in heterogeneous domains including electronic commerce, co-operative work, telecommunications, social and biological systems, robotics, office and business automation, public administration, social simulations and banking. As the applicability of the technology became understood, the multi-agent paradigm has been progressively accepted by product managers and system developers, giving rise to a considerable amount of business expectation from industry. These expectations do not rest on the concept or metaphor of agent, but on the development of MAS useful in an industrial setting, with real-time systems presenting the biggest challenge.

From theoretical and practical viewpoints, the application of intelligent software agents is a topic of major interest. There has been a growing interest not only in new methodologies for development of intelligent software agents, but also the way in which these methodologies can be supported by theories and practice. Intelligent Agent Software Engineering focuses on addressing the theories and practices associated with implementing intelligent software agents.

The only book to present the synergy between modeling and simulation, systems engineering, and agent technologies expands the notion of agent-based simulation to also deal with agent simulation and agent-supported simulation. Accessible to both practitioners and managers, it systematically addresses designing and building agent systems from a systems engineering perspective.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 13th Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) workshop, held at the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2012, in Valencia, Spain, in June 2012. This volume presents 9 thoroughly revised papers selected from 24 submissions as well as two invited articles by leading researchers in the field. The papers cover a broad range of topics related to software engineering of agent-based systems, with particular attention to the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with recent programming languages, platforms, and established software engineering methodologies.

Since the 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into what is now one of the most active areas of research and development activity in computing generally. One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in the agent-based computing paradigm certainly is that the concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. This recognition has led to the growth of interest in agents as a new paradigm for software engineering. This book reflects the state of the art in the field by presenting 14 revised full papers accepted for the second workshop on this topic, AOSE 2001, together with five invited survey articles. The book offers topical sections on societies and organizations, protocols and interaction frameworks, UML and agent systems, agent-oriented requirements capture and specification, and analysis and design.

One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in agent technology is that the concept of an agent, as an autonomous system capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have a state and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting semi-autonomous agents. This book brings together revised versions of papers presented at the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2000, held in Limerick, Ireland, in conjunction with ICSE 2000, and several invited papers. As a comprehensive and competent overview of agent-oriented software engineering, the book addresses software engineers interested in the new paradigm and technology as well as research and development professionals active in agent technology.