Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) is a promising approach to developing applications for dynamic open systems. If well developed, these applications can be opportunistic, taking advantage of services implemented by other developers at appropriate times. However, methodologies are needed to aid the development of systems that are both flexible enough to be opportunistic and tightly defi...

This paper describes an investigation into how the robustness of a software system can be improved via the use of software agents as a fundamental component of the system. Robustness can be achieved through redundancy, and we hypothesize that agents are an appropriate unit for adding redundancy. As part of our investigation, we asked 53 students to independently build one agent for a simple Mul...

We posit that a robust development environment for the construction of agent-oriented software systems must be enhanced by advanced reuse methods. However, research addressing agent reuse is meager and does not tackle the problem of organizing and storing agent-oriented artifacts according to the software engineers’ needs. Therefore, the agent retrieval process turns into an important challenge...

At the 8th Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Workshop, the developers of tools supporting three popular agent-oriented methodologies (Tropos, Prometheus and Organization-based Multiagent Systems Engineering (O-MaSE)) demonstrated their tools using a common multi-agent system design case study: the Conference Management System. The methodologies are representative of the state-of-the-art in ag...

This paper details the implementation of a software framework that aids the development of distributed and self-configurable software systems. This framework is an instance of a novel integration strategy called SoSAA (SOcially Situated Agent Architecture), which combines Component-Based Software Engineering [15] and Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, drawing its inspiration from hybrid agent...

In recent years, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies are proposed to develop complex distributed systems based upon the agent paradigm. The implementation for such systems has usually the form of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). MAS’ testing is a challenging task because these systems are often programmed to be autonomous and deliberative, and they operate in an open world, which...

There is a need for agent oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies that support the conceptual modelling of mobile agent systems. In this paper, we present m-GAIA, our extension to the GAIA methodology for modelling mobile agent systems. m-GAIA incorporates explicit constructs to perform the analysis and design of multiagent systems which include mobile agents. We also present our exp...

Agent-oriented software engineering is a promising new approach to software engineering that uses the notion of an agent as the primary entity of abstraction. The development of methodologies for agentoriented software engineering is an area that is currently receiving much attention, there have been several agent-oriented methodologies proposed recently and survey papers are starting to appear...

Agent-oriented software engineering allows software designers to model a system in terms of interacting agents. Although there are a number of proposals for modeling languages to support multi-agent system development, they are usually based on some other abstraction, e.g., object-oriented. This paper presents a new notation language to design agent-based systems whose diagrams show agency char...