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.

Klappentext

The papers selected for this volume present advances in software engineering approaches to develop dependable high-quality multi-agent systems. These papers describe experiences and techniques associated with large multi-agent systems in a wide variety of problem domains. They cover fault tolerance, exception handling and diagnosis, security and trust, verification and validation, as well as early development phases and software reuse.

Inhalt
Fault Tolerance.- On Fault Tolerance in Law-Governed Multi-agent Systems.- On Developing Open Mobile Fault Tolerant Agent Systems.- Exception Handling and Diagnosis.- Challenges for Exception Handling in Multi-Agent Systems.- Exception Handling in Context-Aware Agent Systems: A Case Study.- Exception Diagnosis Architecture for Open Multi-Agent Systems.- Security and Trust.- SMASH: Modular Security for Mobile Agents.- Reasoning About Willingness in Networks of Agents.- Verification and Validation.- Towards Compliance of Agents in Open Multi-agent Systems.- Towards an Ontological Account of Agent-Oriented Goals.- Early Development Phases and Software Reuse.- Improving Multi-Agent Architectural Design.- Objects as Actors Assuming Roles in the Environment.- A Framework for Situated Multiagent Systems.