Engineering Industrial Multi-Agent Systems The JIAC V Approach

The community of agent researchers and engineers has produced a number of interesting and mature results. However, agent technology is still not widely adopted by industrial software developers or software companies. Yet, given that the software paradigms which are currently employed by the software industry, such as service-oriented architectures or cloud computing, have much in common with agentoriented software engineering, industrial software projects could greatly benefit from agent technology. In this paper, we make an approach to analyse the requirements of current industry-driven software projects and show how we were able to cope with these requirements in the JIAC V agent framework. We argue that the lack of industry-grade requirements and features in other agent frameworks is one of the reasons for the slow acceptance of agent technology in the software industry. The JIAC V framework tries to bridge that gap – not as a final solution, but as a stepping stone towards industrial acceptance.