Agent Oriented Software Engineering Iv

This book assesses the state of the art of agent-based approaches as a software engineering paradigm. The 15 revised full papers presented together with an invited article were carefully selected from 43 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement for the 4th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia, in July during AAMAS 2003. The papers address all current issues in the field of software agents and multi-agent systems relevant for software engineering; they are organized in topical sections on - modeling agents and multi-agent systems -methodologies and tools - patterns, architectures, and reuse - roles and organizations.

This book presents a coherent, 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. Reflecting the importance of agent properties in today's software systems, the power of agent-based software engineering is illustrated using examples that are representative of successful applications.

The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, ent- prise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software is to be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on di?- ent platforms, without recompilation, and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and its users. Furthermore, software must be robust and ̈ autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with a minimum of overhead and interference. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of software systems. They o?er higher-level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, p- ception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which need conceptual modelling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, tra- action control, adaptive work?ows, brokering and integration of disparate inf- mation sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and ?exible treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more e?ective requirements an- ysis and architectural/detailed design.

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.

The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, ent- prise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software is to be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on di- rent platforms, without recompilation, and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and its users. Furthermore, software must be robust and autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with a minimum of overhead and interference. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of so- ware systems. They o?er higher-level abstractions and mechanisms that address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coor- nation, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which need conceptual mo- ling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, transaction control, adaptive work?ows, brokering and integration of disparate information sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and?exible treatments of c- plex organizational processes, leading to more e?ective requirements analysis and architectural/detailed design.

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.

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.

The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, ent- prise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software is to be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on di- rent platforms, without recompilation, and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and its users. Furthermore, software must be robust and autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with a minimum of overhead and interference. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of so- ware systems. They o?er higher-level abstractions and mechanisms that address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coor- nation, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which need conceptual mo- ling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, transaction control, adaptive work?ows, brokering and integration of disparate information sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and ?exible treatments of c- plex organizational processes, leading to more e?ective requirements analysis and architectural/detailed design.