Marie-Pierre Gleizes - Böcker

As information technologies become increasingly distributed and accessible to larger number of people and as commercial and government organizations are challenged to scale their applications and services to larger market shares, while reducing costs, there is demand for software methodologies and appli- tions to provide the following features: Richer application end-to-end functionality; Reduction of human involvement in the design and deployment of the software; Flexibility of software behaviour; and Reuse and composition of existing software applications and systems in novel or adaptive ways. When designing new distributed software systems, the above broad requi- ments and their translation into implementations are typically addressed by partial complementarities and overlapping technologies and this situation gives rise to significant software engineering challenges. Some of the challenges that may arise are: determining the components that the distributed applications should contain, organizing the application components, and determining the assumptions that one needs to make in order to implement distributed scalable and flexible applications, etc.

With increasing acceptance of agent-based computing, a great deal of new research related to the identification and definition of suitable models, 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 developement methodologies and tools. The contributions in Methodology 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.

The ?rst workshop “Engineering Societies in the Agents World” (ESAW) was held in August 2000, in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2000) in Berlin. It was launched by a group of - searchers who thought that the design and development of MASs (multi-agent systems) not only needed adequate theoretical foundations but also a call for new techniques, methodologies and infrastructures to develop MASs as arti?cial societies. The second ESAW was co-located with the European Agent Summer School (ACAI 2001) in Prague, and mostly focused on logics and languages, middleware, infrastructures and applications. In Madrid, the third ESAW c- centrated on models and methodologies and took place with the “Cooperative Information Agents” workshop (CIA 2002). The fourth ESAW in London was the ?rst one that ran as a stand-alone event: apart from the usual works on methodologies and models, it also stressed the issues of applications and m- tidisciplinary models. Based on the success of previous ESAWs, and also given that the di?cult challenges in the construction of arti?cial societies are not yet fully addressed, the ?fth ESAW workshop was organized in the same spirit as its predecessors. Inparticular,ESAW2004tookplaceattheIRITlaboratoryoftheUniversit´ e “Paul Sabatier” (Toulouse, France), at the end of October 2004. It was not - located with any other scienti?c event, in the same way as ESAW 2003. ESAW 2004 remained committed to the use of the notion of MASs as the seeds for animated, constructive and highly interdisciplinary discussions about techno- gies,methodologiesandtoolsfortheengineeringofcomplexdistributedsystems.

ESAW 2005 took place at the Pine Bay Hotel in Kusadasi, Turkey at the end of the October 2005. It was organized as a stand-alone event as were ESAW 2004and ESAW 2003.Following the initial ESAW vision,which wasset in 1999, by the members of the working group on “Communication, Coordination and Collaboration” of Agentlink, ESAW 2005 continued to focus on the engineering of complex software systems in terms of multi-agent societies, especially the social and environmental aspects of such societies. The number of participants (40 researchers from 10 countries) and the highly interactive discussions held during the workshop showed the augmented importance of the initial vision as well as the e?ectiveness of ESAW as a well-established research forum. It is obvious that today’s interconnected world increases the importance of approaches concerning the engineering of complex and distributed software systems. These kinds of large scale systems, made up of massive numbers of autonomous components, force us to discover new and novel approaches to model and engineer such systems as agent societies. It is very likely that such innovations will exploit lessons from a variety of di?erent scienti?c disciplines, such as sociology, economics, organizational science and biology: ESAW 2005 included presentations from these domains in addition to its traditional - search topics.

Self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance are promising conceptual approaches for dealing with complex distributed interactive software and information-handling systems. Self-organising applications dynamically change their functionality and structure without direct user intervention, responding to changes in requirements and the environment. This is the first book to offer an integrated view of self-organisation technologies applied to distributed systems, particularly focusing on multiagent systems. The editors developed this integrated book with three aims: to explain self-organisation concepts and principles, using clear definitions and a strong theoretical background; to examine how self-organising behaviour can be modelled, analysed and systematically engineered into agent behaviour; and to assess the types of problems that can be solved using self-organising multiagent systems. The book comprises chapters covering all three dimensions, synthesising up-to-date research work and the latest technologies and applications. The book offers dedicated chapters on concepts such as self-organisation, emergence in natural systems, software agents, stigmergy, gossip, cooperation and immune systems. The book then explains how to engineer artificial self-organising software, in particular it examines methodologies and middleware infrastructures. Finally, the book presents diverse applications of self-organising software, such as constraint satisfaction, trust management, image recognition and networking.The book will be of interest to researchers working on emergent phenomena and adaptive systems. It will also be suitable for use as a graduate textbook, with chapter summaries and exercises, and an accompanying website that includes teaching slides, exercise solutions and research project outlines.Self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair and self-maintenance are promising conceptual approaches for dealing with complex distributed interactive software and information-handling systems. Self-organising applications dynamically change their functionality and structure without direct user intervention, responding to changes in requirements and the environment. This is the first book to offer an integrated view of self-organisation technologies applied to distributed systems, particularly focusing on multiagent systems. The editors developed this integrated book with three aims: to explain self-organisation concepts and principles, using clear definitions and a strong theoretical background; to examine how self-organising behaviour can be modelled, analysed and systematically engineered into agent behaviour; and to assess the types of problems that can be solved using self-organising multiagent systems. The book comprises chapters covering all three dimensions, synthesising up-to-date research work and the latest technologies and applications. The book offers dedicated chapters on concepts such as self-organisation, emergence in natural systems, software agents, stigmergy, gossip, cooperation and immune systems. The book then explains how to engineer artificial self-organising software, in particular it examines methodologies and middleware infrastructures. Finally, the book presents diverse applications of self-organising software, such as constraint satisfaction, trust management, image recognition and networking.The book will be of interest to researchers working on emergent phenomena and adaptive systems. It will also be suitable for use as a graduate textbook, with chapter summaries and exercises, and an accompanying website that includes teaching slides, exercise solutions and research project outlines.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2009, held in Budapest, Hungary, in May 2009 as part of AAMAS 2009, the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous initial submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers have been organized into three sections on multi-agent organizations, concrete development techniques, and - one step higher - going beyond the concrete technique and proposing a development method for designing concrete types of systems.This state-of-the-art survey is rounded off by five additional lectures addressing key areas in development: agent-oriented modelling languages, implementation of MAS, testing of MAS, software processes, and formal methods for the development of MAS. They permit analysis of the current state in the generation of specifications of MAS, the way these specifications can be implemented, how they can be validated, andwhat steps are necessary to do so.

Since the mid 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into a very active area of research and also commercial development activity. One of the limiting factors in industry take-up of agent-technology,  however, is the lack of adequate software engineering support. The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Workshop, AOSE, focuses on the synergies and cross fertilization between software engineering and agent research.This volume presents both thoroughly revised selected papers from the AOSE 2010 workshop held at AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada in May 2010 as well as invited articles by leading researchers in the field. The papers cover a broad range of topics related to software engineering and agent-based systems, with particular attention to the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with conventional engineering approaches on the one hand, and to the integration of agent-oriented software engineering and methodologies with conventional engineering processes on the other hand.