Multi-Agent System Engineering

In the ten years since the first MAAMAW was held in 1989, at King's College, Cambridge, the field of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has flourished. It has attracted an increasing amount of theoretical and applied research. During this decade, important efforts have been made to establish the scientific and technical foundations of MAS. MAAMAW publications are testimony to the progress achieved in key areas such as agent modelling and reasoning, multi-agent interaction and communication, and multi-agent organisation and social structure. Research results have covered a wide range of inter-related topics in each area including agent architectures, reasoning models, logics, conflict resolution, negotiation, resource allocation, load balancing, learning; social behaviour and interaction, languages and protocols, interagent and agent-human communication, social models, agent roles, norms and social laws, and static and dynamic organisational structures. The feasibility and the viability of the proposed models and techniques have been demonstrated through MAS applications in heterogeneous domains including electronic commerce, co-operative work, telecommunications, social and biological systems, robotics, office and business automation, public administration, social simulations and banking. As the applicability of the technology became understood, the multi-agent paradigm has been progressively accepted by product managers and system developers, giving rise to a considerable amount of business expectation from industry. These expectations do not rest on the concept or metaphor of agent, but on the development of MAS useful in an industrial setting, with real-time systems presenting the biggest challenge.

Inhalt

Engineering Aspects of Multi-agent Systems.- Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.- Specification of Bahavioural Requirements within Compositional Multi-agent System Design.- Agent-Oriented Design.- A Developer's Perspective on Multi-agent System Design.- Multi-agent Systems Framework.- A Development Environment for the Realization of Open and Scalable Multi-agent Systems.- Modelling Agents in Hard Real-Time Environments.- Multi-agent Systems on the Internet: Extending the Scope of Coordination towards Security and Topology.- Languages and Protocols.- Protocol Engineering for Multi-agent Interaction.- Designing Agent Communication Languages for Multi-agent Systems.- A Temporal Agent Communication Language for Dynamic Multi-agent Systems.- Multi-paradigm Languages Supporting Multi-agent Development.- Negotiation and Cooperation.- An Efficient Argumentation Framework for Negotiating Autonomous Agents.- Negotiating Service Provisioning.- Cooperative Plan Selection Through Trust.- Extending Social Reasoning to Cope with Multiple Partner Coalitions.- Formal Models.- Basic Mental Attitudes of a Collaborating Agent: Cognitive Primitives for MAS.- Subjective Situations.- Formal Analysis of Models for the Dynamics of Trust Based on Experiences.