It is indisputable that software development using agents and, more specifically, the multi-agent systems concept has greater potential for dealing with complex problems than other more traditional approaches. The agent paradigm is acquiring the status of an engineering discipline and gradually leaving the laboratory and moving into industry. However, it has two major omissions: it is missing a...

In this paper we provide an agent-based model of the population behaviour during a bushfire in the state of Victoria in Australia, intended to serve as a basis for decision-support simulations for emergency managers. In order for the simulation results to be valid, our model therefore needs to be as realistic as possible, in particular regarding the agent architecture. After providing some cont...

With the increasing importance of complex software systems in the software industry, the need for using agent technologies to develop large-scale commercial and industrial software systems is growing rapidly. Such systems are complex and there is a pressing need for system modeling techniques to support reliable, maintainable and extensible design. G-Nets are a type of Petri net defined to supp...

Agents are becoming one of the most important topics in distributed and autonomous decentralized systems, and there are increasing attempts to use agent technologies to develop large-scale commercial and industrial software systems. The complexity of such systems suggests a pressing need for system modeling techniques to support reliable, maintainable and extensible design. G-nets are a type of...

This paper is the first step of an exploration of the possibilities offered by the application of UML to agent-based software. Starting from UML definitions of use cases and actors we discuss their correspondence to agents and external entities of the environment. An example is also presented that starts form a classical well–known case of study.

Non-linear, stochastic, thermodynamic, agent based or network modelling are powerful tools brought from other fields into economics. Applied in almost every sub-field of economics, these tools had however substantial success only in the analysis of financial markets. We suggest that the reason for this is less the insufficiency of these technical tools but rather the incapacity of mainstream ec...

We propose using community-centered analyses and agent-based models of scientific gatherings such as conferences, symposia and workshops as a way to understand how scientific practices evolve and transition between local, community, and systems levels in science. We suggest using robotics as a case study of global, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary scientific practice. What is needed is a set o...

The performance of a team at a task depends critically on the composition of its members. There is a notion of synergy in human teams that represents how well teams work together, and we are interested in modeling synergy in multiagent teams. We focus on the problem of team formation, i.e., selecting a subset of a group of agents in order to perform a task, where each agent has its own capabili...

Numerous methodologies for developing agent-based systems have been proposed in the literature. However, their application is still limited due to their lack of maturity. Evaluating methodologies’ strengths and weaknesses plays an important role in improving them and in developing the “next-generation” of methodologies. This paper presents a comparison of three prominent agent-oriented methodol...