This book presents a coherent, 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. Reflecting the importance of agent properties in today's software systems, the power of agent-based software engineering is illustrated using examples that are representative of successful applications.

Inhalt

Context-Awareness and Coordination.- Policy-Driven Configuration and Management of Agent Based Distributed Systems.- Views: Middleware Abstractions for Context-Aware Applications in MANETs.- An Adaptive Distributed Layout for Multi-agent Applications.- Self-organizing Approaches for Large-Scale Spray Multiagent Systems.- Coordination Artifacts as First-Class Abstractions for MAS Engineering: State of the Research.- Modeling.- Analysis and Design of Physical and Social Contexts in Multi-agent Systems.- Engineering Organization-Based Multiagent Systems.- Developing and Evaluating a Generic Metamodel for MAS Work Products.- Agent Roles, Qua Individuals and the Counting Problem.- Requirements and Software Architecture.- A Product-Line Approach to Promote Asset Reuse in Multi-agent Systems.- Characterization and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Architectural Styles.- Improving Flexibility and Robustness in Agent Interactions: Extending Prometheus with Hermes.- Patterns for Modelling Agent Systems with Tropos.- Dependability.- On the Use of Formal Specifications as Part of Running Programs.- Adaptive Replication of Large-Scale Multi-agent Systems - Towards a Fault-Tolerant Multi-agent Platform.