Promoting Undergraduate Education with Agent Based Laboratory

Agent-oriented design has become one of the most active areas in the field of software engineering. The agent concept provides a focal point for accountability and responsibility for coping with the complexity of software systems both during design and execution (Yu, 2001). It is deemed that software engineering challenges in developing large scale distributed systems can be overcome by an agent-based approach (Paquette, 2001). In this approach, a distributed system can be modeled as a set of autonomous, cooperating agents that communicate intelligently with one another, automate or semi-automate functional operations, and interact with human users at the right time with the right information.