In this White Paper, produced as a result of discussions at the OOPSLA 2002 Workshop on Agent-Oriented Methodologies, we outline the current state of play of agent-oriented methodologies, how they might be integrated into an underlying, metamodel-based framework, and what the research community needs to do to make their products acceptable to industry. We conclude with an invitation to the comm...

Many modern computer applications are open distributed systems in which the (very many) constituent components are spread throughout a network, in a decentralized control regime, and which are subject to constant change throughout the system’s lifetime. Examples include the grid (Foster and Kesselman 1998), peer-to-peer computing (Gong 2002), the semantic web (BernersLee et al. 2001), web servi...

Despite decades of research, the takeup of formal methods for developing provably correct software in industry remains slow. One reason for this is the high cost of proof construction, an activity that, due to the complexity of the required proofs, is typically carried out using interactive theorem provers. In this paper we propose an agent-oriented architecture for interactive theorem proving ...

many important and useful applications for software agents require multiple agents on a network that communicate with each other. we often use the word “agent” to describe people who have a helping or assistive relationship to us –– travel agents, secretaries, butlers. the job of such an agent is to act autonomously to satisfy goals that we may have, give us a greater sense of productivity and ...

The use of intelligent agents is on the rise, fueled by the unprecedented growth in the internet and web based applications. Consequently, agent-oriented software is becoming large and complex. To support a systematic development of such software, an agent-oriented software development methodology is necessary. This chapter focuses on the modeling phase of agent-oriented software life cycle and...

Despite the progress in agent oriented software engineering, there is still a long way before achieving maturity. Among others, there is a lack of shared experience in evaluating the cost when developing software using the agent paradigm. This paper provides some results on this issue. It collects data from real agent based projects and gives hints for the application of existing software cost ...

Software engineers continually strive to develop tools and techniques to manage the complexity that is inherent in software systems. In this article, we argue that intelligent agents and agent-based systems are just such tools. Following a discussion on the subject of what makes software complex, we introduce intelligent agents as software structures capable of making “rational decisions”. Such...

Agent-oriented approach to software engineering (Agent-SE) for mul-tiagent software design is presented. It includes methods to generate organizational information for cooperative and coordinative agents. Agent-SE can be used to design and implement complex, heterogeneous, distributed and networked software systems using dynamic agent coalition structure.

Agent-oriented software engineering is faced with challenges that impact on the adoption of agent technology by the wider software engineering community. This is generally due to lack of adequate comprehension of the concepts of agent technology. This thesis is based on the premise that the comprehension of the concepts of and the adoption of agent technology can be improved. Two approaches are...