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.

Klappentext

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.