This paper is the synthesis of joint work realised in a technical forum group within the AgentLink III NoE framework, which elaborated on issues concerning self-organization and emergence in multi-agent systems (MAS). The work concluded on a common definition of the concepts of self-organization and emergence in MAS and the associated properties and characteristics. Also it developed towards an...

These questions have led to a wide variety of research disciplines. To make concrete these various research disciplines, several distributed architectures have been proposed. However, the use of these distributed architectures requires a very complex parametrization. This complexity is the result of the type of problem resolution which is founded on negotiation. Negotiation is one of the most i...

When one has to design multi-agent systems for realistic world applications one needs a certain level of self-organization to be able to cope with the dynamic environment. The selforganization can manifest itself in different aspects. It depends on the application on which aspect one should focus the research effort. We have identified which aspects we consider important, and translated this in...

Although Multi Agent Systems (MAS) have attracted a great deal of attention in the field of software engineering, with their promise of capturing complex systems, they remain far away from commercial popularity mainly due to the accessibility of MAS methodologies for commercial developers. In this paper we present a practical method for developing self-managing MAS that we believe enables not o...

because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agent systems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of these systems. in competitive multi agent systems, a mechanism is required via which the agents can come to reach an agreement.  contract net protocols are one of the well-known negotiation protocols in multi-agent systems. in contract net pro...

Systems biology and cell simulation started together and maintain a controvertible relationship within the scope of global approaches and emergence-driven approaches. Here, we present a multi-agent based model for cell simulation. We describe the whole model creation process, from its scientific project perspective to implementation considerations. The agents interactions model will be particul...

Research on Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) is undergoing a huge amount of interest and developments. In spite of the great amount of effort devoted to architectures and algorithms for holonic control of manufacturing systems there are little work about design methodologies. In this work we present a multi agent methodology for analysis and design of HMS, it is based on an abstract agent de...

Complexity of today’s systems prevents designers from knowing everything about them and makes engineering them a difficult task for which classical engineering approaches are no longer valid. Such a challenge is especially encountered in actual complex systems simulation in which underlying computational model is very tough to design. A prospective solution is to unburden designers as much as p...