Ricardo Choren – författare

This book presents a coherent and well-balanced survey of recent advances in software engineering approaches to the design and analysis of realistic large-scale multi-agent systems (MAS). The chapters included are devoted to various techniques and methods used to cope with the complexity of real-world MAS. The power of agent-based software engineering is illustrated using examples that are representative of successful applications.The 16 thoroughly reviewed and revised full papers are organized in topical sections on agent methodologies and processes, requirements engineering and software architectures, modeling languages, and dependability and coordination. Most of the papers were initially presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-agent Systems, SELMAS 2004, held in Edinburgh, UK in May 2004 in association with ICSE 2004. Other papers were invited to complete coverage of all relevant aspects.

With the integration of computing and communication into the very fabric of our social, economic, and personal existence, the manner in which we think about and build software has become the subject of intense intellectual, scienti?c, and engineering reexamination. New computing paradigms have been proposed and new software architectures are being examined. The study of multi-agent s- tems (MAS) is one important movement energized by a growing awareness that application development may need to follow radically new paths. Fundamentally, MAS denotes a new software speci?cation and design paradigm. Moreover, when viewed in the context of large-scale deployment, it emerges as the embodiment of the quintessential concerns facing the software engineering community today. As computing and communication permeates the essential aspects of the societal infrastructure, software must become more nimble, slimmer, more natural, and more discrete. Software must integrate itself in an organic way into the activities it serves and the resources it exploits.

With the integration of computing and communication into the very fabric of our social, economic, and personal existence, the manner in which we think about and build software has become the subject of intense intellectual, scienti?c, and engineering reexamination. New computing paradigms have been proposed and new software architectures are being examined. The study of multi-agent s- tems (MAS) is one important movement energized by a growing awareness that application development may need to follow radically new paths. Fundamentally, MAS denotes a new software speci?cation and design paradigm. Moreover, when viewed in the context of large-scale deployment, it emerges as the embodiment of the quintessential concerns facing the software engineering community today. As computing and communication permeates the essential aspects of the societal infrastructure, software must become more nimble, slimmer, more natural, and more discrete. Software must integrate itself in an organic way into the activities it serves and the resources it exploits.

Software is present in every aspect of our lives, pushing us inevitably towards a world of distributed computing systems. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of large-scale distributed systems. Multi-agent systems (MASs) and their underlying theories provide a more natural support for ensuring important agent properties, such as autonomy, environment heterogeneity, organization and openness. Nevertheless, a software agent is an inherently more complex abstraction, posing new challenges to software engineering. Without adequate development te- niques and methods, MASs will not be sufficiently dependable, thus making their wide adoption by the industry more difficult. The dependability of a computing system is its ability to deliver a service that can be justifiably trusted. It is a singular time for dependable distributed systems, since the traditional models we use to express the relationships between a computational process and its environment are changing from the standard deterministic types into ones that are more distributed and dynamic. This served as a guiding principle for planning the Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems (SELMAS 2006) workshop, starting with selecting the theme, “building dependable multi-agent systems.” It acknowledges our belief in the increasingly vital role dependability plays as an essential element of MAS development.