Building Complex Software Systems: The Case for an Agent-Based Approach

Building high quality, industrial-strength software is difficult. Indeed, it has been argued that developing such software in domains like telecommunications, industrial control and business process management represents one of the most complex construction tasks humans undertake. Against this background, a wide range of software engineering paradigms have been devised. Each successive development either claims to make the engineering process easier or to extend the complexity of applications that can feasibly be built. Although evidence is emerging to support these claims, researchers continue to strive for more effective techniques. To this end, this paper will argue that analysing, designing and implementing complex software systems as a collection of interacting, autonomous agents (i.e., as a multi-agent system [4]) affords software engineers a number of significant advantages over contemporary methods. This is not to say that agent-oriented software engineering represents a silver bullet [2]—there is no evidence to suggest it will represent an order of magnitude improvement in productivity. However, the increasing number of deployed applications [4] [8] bears testament to the potential advantages that accrue from such an approach. In seeking to demonstrate the efficacy of agent-oriented techniques, the most compelling argument would be to quantitatively show how their adoption had improved the development process in a range of projects. However, such data is simply not available (as it is not for approaches like patterns, application frameworks and component-ware). Given this fact, the best that can be achieved is a qualitative justification of why agent-oriented approaches are well suited to engineering complex, distributed software systems.