agent technology is an emerging and promising research area in software technology, which increasingly contributes to the development of value-added information systems for large healthcare organizations due to its capability to automatically modify themselves in response to changes in their operating environment. multi agent system (mas) approach is the construction of a complex system as a se...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over traditional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today’s corporate IT applications such as eBusiness systems, web services or enterprise knowledge bases. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional rather than object, functional, or implementation-oriented, ...

Like in any distributed systems, communication in Multi-Agent System (MAS) plays an important role as it helps agents sharing knowledge and facilitating cooperation. Communication in MAS may present at various forms; it can be exchanging of comprehensible messages, or requesting to perform an action, or negotiating cooperation. Agent communication has common properties like in any other distrib...

We present a decentralized heuristic applicable to multi-agent systems (MAS), which is able to solve multiple-choice combinatorial optimization problems (MC-COP). First, the MC-COP problem class is introduced and subsequently a mapping to MAS is shown, in which each class of elements in MC-COP corresponds to a single agent in MAS. The proposed heuristic ”COHDA” is described in detail, including...

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used in critical applications. To ensure dependability of MAS, we need powerful development techniques that would allow us to master complexity inherent to MAS and formally verify correctness and safety of collaborative agent activities. In this paper we present a rigorous approach to development and verification of critical MAS in Event-B. We demonstr...

Multi-Agent System’s (MAS) are characterized by autonomous and collaborative behaviors. Developing such systems is a complex process. As a result, a methodology for developing MAS is highly necessary. In this paper, a methodology using roles and ontology for such a purpose is presented. The functionality of roles is estimated in the various phases of the MAS development. It is based on an empha...

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly emerging as a powerful paradigm for modeling and developing distributed information systems. In an open multi-agent system, agents can not only join or leave an agent society at will, but also take or release roles dynamically. Most of existing work on MAS uses role modeling for system analysis; however, role models are only used at conceptual level with no...

Agent-oriented methodologies and related modeling techniques have become a priority for the development of large scale agent-based systems. Several methodologies have been proposed for the development of multiagent systems (MAS). For the most part, these methodologies remain incomplete: they are either an extension of object-oriented methodologies or an extension of knowledge-based methodologie...

Testing software agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) needs suitable techniques to evaluate agent’s autonomous behaviours as well as distribution, social and deliberative properties, which are particular to these systems. This paper reviews testing methods and techniques with respect to the MAS properties they are able to address. For this purpose, we provide a reference framework that provides...