Software engineering for multi-agent systems II

by SELMAS 2003 (2003 Portland, Or.)

Advances in networking technology have revitalized the investigation of agent technologyasapromisingparadigmforengineeringcomplexdistributedsoftware systems. Agent technology has been applied to a wide range of application - mains, including e-commerce, human-computer interfaces, telecommunications, and software assistants. Multi-agent systems (MASs) and their underlying t- ories provide a more natural support for ensuring important properties such as autonomy, mobility, environment heterogeneity, organization, openness, and intelligence. As a consequence, agent-based systems are likely to provide new - proaches to dealing with the complexity of developing and maintaining modern software. However, developing robust large-scale agent-based systems will - quire new software engineering approaches. There are currently many methods and techniques for working with individual agents or with systems built using only a few agents. Unfortunately, agent-based software engineering is still in its