Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems: The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Handbook (Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations)
| 2004-06-30 00:00:00 | | 0 | Software Engineering
With increasing acceptance of agent-based computing, a great deal of new research related to the identification and definition of suitable models, tools, and techniques to support the development of complex Multiagent Systems (MAS) has emerged. This research, generally identified as Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), continually proposes new metaphors, new formal modeling approaches and techniques, and new development methodologies and tools. The contributions in Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems, written by leading international researchers, bring together these diverse research results and proposals. The book is separated into six parts, providing the reader with introductory material, concepts and techniques that already provide results for practical use, and research that is still more investigative in nature: Part I introduces the different facets of AOSE research and clarifies why agent-based approaches are suitable to the development of complex software systems, Part II presents three methodologies-Gaia, Tropos, and MaSE-that have been proposed as general-purpose approaches to guide the development of complex MAS, Part III shows four additional methodologies-ADELFE, MESSAGE, SADDE, and Prometheus-that exhibit appealing characteristics which make them suitable for development of specific classes of MAS, such as adaptive MAS and systems based on intelligent intentional agents, and for development of specific application areas, such as telecommunications and agent marketplaces, Part IV shifts the focus from methodologies to infrastructures and tools. Conceptual tools like the FIPA standard and AUML, plus software infrastructures such as tuple-based ones and JADE, are among the most promising ones available to developers, concentrates on innovative approaches to the engineering of agent-based systems, starting from radically different assumptions and concepts than ones traditionally adopted in software development-those that rely on self-organization principles and on biologically or physically inspired solutions, such as swarm intelligence, amorphous computing, adaptive MAS, and online engineering of open systems, nally, Part VI describes two emerging scenarios that are taking benefits from MAS technologies-the Grid and Ubiquitous Computing. The final chapter of the book delineates a research roadmap in the area of AOSE.