Trends in distance education show a growing emphasis in collaborative learning, stimulating students to exchange ideas and information. A collaborative environment, however, will demand a higher effort from the teacher, who will have to supervise all the discussions among the learners, so that they do not deviate from the intended topic for the lesson. Moreover, the information proceeding from ...

The main goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the rapidly developing area of software agents serving as a reference point to a large body of literature and to present the key concepts of software agent technology, especially agent languages, tools and platforms. Special attention is paid to significant languages designed and developed in order to support implementation of agent-based...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word methodology as ‘the branch of knowledge that deals with method generally or with the methods of a particular discipline or field of study’. Subsequently, the word methodolgy also refers to ‘the study of the suitability of the techniques employed in it’. For software development methodology, the discipline or the field of study is, of course, softwa...

The growth of interest in agent-orientation as a new paradigm has introduced the need for developing concepts, tools and techniques for modeling and engineering agent-based software systems. Object technology has been supporting the development of information systems for many years but is now slowly evolving to encompass more recent ideas relating to the concept of "agent". Integrating agent co...

Multi-agent systems (MAS) differ from non-agent based systems because agents are intended to be autonomous units of intelligent functionality. As a consequence, agent-based software engineering methods must complement standard design activities and representations with models of the agent society. Some methods coming from artificial intelligence community address social knowledge and relationsh...

Agent technology is one of the most widely discussed topics in information systems and computer science literature. New software products are being introduced each day. A growing number of computer information professionals recognize that there are definite issues surrounding intelligent agent terminology. These must be resolved if agent technology is to continue to develop and establish. Curre...

Today software systems are complex, dynamic, distributed, and evolve over time. Multi-agent systems (MASs) are a powerful abstraction to model such systems. Agent programming frameworksion to model such systems. Agent programming frameworks support software engineers in transforming these abstractions into concrete distributed applications. Even though there is wide availability of tools for mu...

 Founding information: This work is partially sponsored by the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China (M603245, Y106469), and National high tech research and development plan (863plan):2007AA01Z105-05 Abstract—Using software agents as next generation flexible components and applying reuse technologies to rapidly construct agents and agent systems have great promise to improve a...