Agent Oriented Software Engineering

With this book, Onn Shehory and Arnon Sturm, together with further contributors, introduce the reader to various facets of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). They provide a selected collection of state-of-the-art findings, which combines research from information systems, artificial intelligence, distributed systems and software engineering and covers essential development aspects of agent-based systems. The book chapters are organized into five parts. The first part introduces the AOSE domain in general, including introduction to agents and the peculiarities of software engineering for developing MAS. The second part describes general aspects of AOSE, like architectural models, design patterns and communication. Next, part three discusses AOSE methodologies and associated research directions and elaborates on Prometheus, O-MaSE and INGENIAS. Part four then addresses agent-oriented programming languages. Finally, the fifth part presents studies related to the implementation of agents and multi-agent systems. The book not only provides a comprehensive review of design approaches for specifying agent-based systems, but also covers implementation aspects such as communication, standards and tools and environments for developing agent-based systems. It is thus of interest to researchers, practitioners and students who are interested in exploring the agent paradigm for developing software systems.

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.

As information technologies become increasingly distributed and accessible to larger number of people and as commercial and government organizations are challenged to scale their applications and services to larger market shares, while reducing costs, there is demand for software methodologies and appli- tions to provide the following features: Richer application end-to-end functionality; Reduction of human involvement in the design and deployment of the software; Flexibility of software behaviour; and Reuse and composition of existing software applications and systems in novel or adaptive ways. When designing new distributed software systems, the above broad requi- ments and their translation into implementations are typically addressed by partial complementarities and overlapping technologies and this situation gives rise to significant software engineering challenges. Some of the challenges that may arise are: determining the components that the distributed applications should contain, organizing the application components, and determining the assumptions that one needs to make in order to implement distributed scalable and flexible applications, etc.

Since the mid 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into a very active area of research and also commercial development activity. One of the limiting factors in industry take-up of agent-technology, however, is the lack of adequate software engineering support. The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Workshop, AOSE, focuses on the synergies and cross fertilization between software engineering and agent research. This volume presents both thoroughly revised selected papers from the AOSE 2010 workshop held at AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada in May 2010 as well as invited articles by leading researchers in the field. The papers cover a broad range of topics related to software engineering and agent-based systems, with particular attention to the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with conventional engineering approaches on the one hand, and to the integration of agent-oriented software engineering and methodologies with conventional engineering processes on the other hand.

"The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling is an introduction to agent-oriented software development for students and for software developers who are interested in learning about new software engineering techniques."--Foreword.

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.

This book presents a coherent and well-balanced survey of recent advances in software engineering approaches to the design and analysis of realistic large-scale multi-agent systems (MAS). The chapters included are devoted to various techniques and methods used to cope with the complexity of real-world MAS. The power of agent-based software engineering is illustrated using examples that are representative of successful applications. The 16 thoroughly reviewed and revised full papers are organized in topical sections on agent methodologies and processes, requirements engineering and software architectures, modeling languages, and dependability and coordination. Most of the papers were initially presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-agent Systems, SELMAS 2004, held in Edinburgh, UK in May 2004 in association with ICSE 2004. Other papers were invited to complete coverage of all relevant aspects.