Recently, two advances in agent-oriented software engineering have had a significant impact: the identification of interaction and coordination as the central focus of multiagent systems design and the realization that the multiagent organization is distinct from the agents that populate the system. This paper presents detailed guidance on how to integrate organizational rules into existing mul...

Multiagent planning deals with the problem of generatingplans for multiple agents. It requires formalizing ways for the agents tointeract and cooperate, in order to achieve their goals. We will discuss twopossible ways for agents to interact: the execution of cooperative actionsand negotiations. We begin with the introduction of an action languagefor specifying multiagent pl...

Multiagent systems are a matter of growing importance in distributed artificial intelligence. Whereas several applications based on multiagent systems have been developed to address disparate fields, little work has been done for the definition of general methodologies to develop multiagent systems. The purpose of this paper is to present a formal description of the first phase of the design of...

Cooperative multiagent systems are an important area of research, with many applications including air traffic control, satellite communications, and extraplanetary exploration. These applications also lend themselves to multiple simultaneous objectives, but multiobjective multiagent systems have garnered little attention. We make contributions to three distinct aspects of multi-objective multi...

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...

— Researchers designing the multiagent tools and techniques for CSCL environments are often faced with high cost, time, and effort required to investigate the effectiveness of their tools and techniques in large-scale and longitudinal studies in a real-world environment containing human users. Here, we propose SimCoL, a multiagent environment that simulates colla-borative learning among student...

the integration of two distinct lines of AI research: (1) decision-theoretic planning (DTP) and (2) multiagent systems. Both areas (especially the second) are attracting considerable interest, but work in multiagent systems often assumes either classical planning models or prespecified economic valuations on the part of the agents in question. By integrating models of DTP in multiagent systems ...

Norms and normative multiagent systems have become the subjects of interest for many researchers. Such interest is caused by the need for agents to exploit the norms in enhancing their performance in a community. The term norm is used to characterize the behaviours of community members. The concept of normative multiagent systems is used to facilitate collaboration and coordination among social...

Recently, the perspective on the role of the environment in multiagent systems has undergone a fundamental change. Whereas functionalities of the environment are often dealt with implicitly or in an ad-hoc manner, recent research puts forward the environment as a first-order design abstraction in multiagent systems. Several researchers have demonstrated that the environment can be used in a cre...

We investigate a class of multiagent planning problems termed multiagent expedition, where agents move around an open, unknown, partially observable, stochastic, and physical environment, in pursuit of multiple and alternative goals of different utility. Optimal planning in multiagent expedition is highly intractable.We introduce the notion of conditional optimality, decompose the task into a s...