1 Introduction: The Agent Paradigm
During
the last decade, Agent-Oriented
Software Engineering (AOSE) has attracted the attention of a
large community of researchers from many different fields, including
artificial intelligence and distributed systems. This interest has been
motivated by the potential benefits of the agent paradigm, which needs
to be integrated in software engineering practices in order to be
applicable in the software industry as a whole.
Although
there are many definitions of the agent concept (see, for instance,
those included in Michael Wooldridge’s book “An Introduction to Multiagent Systems”,
John Wiley & Sons, 2002), most of them identify their distributed
nature, autonomy, sociability (hence the term Multi-Agent System, MAS, as agents
normally collaborate within organizations to achieve common goals),
adaptability to the environment, and even mobility through a network of
computer resources. Agents have been applied with different purposes
and in different environments: for personal assistants, to providing
support for collaborative work, for trading and negotiation in
emarkets, in huge social simulation systems, for web information
systems, for e-games, etc.
A
common classification scheme of agents is the weak and strong notion of agency. In the
weak notion of agency, agents have their own will (autonomy), they are
able to interact with each other (social
ability), they respond to stimuli (reactivity), and they take the
initiative (pro-activity). In
the strong notion of agency, in addition to the characteristics
displayed by the weak notion of agency, agents can also move around (mobility), they are truthful (veracity), they do what they’re
told (benevolence), and they
will perform in an optimal manner to achievegoals (rationality). Due to the fact that
existing agents have more in common with software than with
intelligence, they will be referred to as software agents or agents in this context.
2 Bringing Agent Technology to Market
Successfully
bringing agent technology to market requires techniques that reduce the
perceived risk inherent in any new technology, by presenting the new
technology as an incremental extension of known and trusted methods,
and by providing explicit engineering tools to support proven methods
of technology deployment. Applied to agents, these insights imply an
approach that:
- introduces agents as an extension of active objects:
an agent is an object that can say “go” (flexible autonomy as the
ability to initiate action without external invocation) and “no”
(flexible autonomy as the ability to refuse or modify an external
request);
- promotes the use of standard representations for
methods and tools to support the analysis, specification, and design of
agent software.
As
pointed out by some of the articles appearing in this monograph, until
recently developing a MAS has been more of an art than a structured
discipline. We can currently we can find tools able to produce complete
MAS from a specification, libraries of components that deal with
concrete MAS issues (distributed planning, reasoning, learning), and
theories that describe MAS behaviour and properties. Knowing all of
them requires a great effort. There are surveys which facilitate the
task, but it is hard to give an overall view of what software,
theories, methodologies exist, and how they are applied to MAS
development.
3 What Is This Monograph about?
Having
into account all the above, we have selected a set of papers that
address some of the most important aspects and issues of this promising
field.
To
begin with, Michael
Luck’s and Peter
McBurney’s paper “Challenges for Agent Technology Moving
towards 2010” gives us an answer to the question about how
Agent Technology is evolving and summarises the current
state-of-the-art in this field, identifying trends and challenges that
will need to be addressed over the next 10 years in order to progress
in the field and reap the benefits. Similarly, but in this case
specifically oriented towards the MAS developing process and
methodologies, the paper by Franco Zambonelli
and Andrea Omicini,
“Open
Directions in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering”, aims to
identify key open research directions in the development process of
AOSE. Also related with the development process is the contribution
from Rubén
Fuentes-Fernández, Jorge J.
Gómez-Sanz, and Juan
Pavón-Mestras “Verification and Validation Techniques for
Multi-Agent Systems”, which gives an overview of, and
presents some of the new methods used in, MAS verification and
validation. Following the same line of argument, the work by Marco Aiello and
Paolo Giorgini
“Applying the
Tropos Methodology for Analysing Web Services Requirements and
Reasoning about Qualities”, proposes the use of the
agent-oriented methodology Tropos for the analysis of web service
requirements, and describes how it can be used to model quality of
service requirements.
An
example of how to develop a MAS using currently available methods and
tools is presented by the contribution from Pedro Cuesta-Morales,
Alma-María
Gómez-Rodríguez, and Francisco J.
Rodríguez-Martínez “Developing a Multi-Agent System Using MaSE
and JADE”. The paper “Engineering Multi-Agent Systems as
Electronic Institutions” by Carles Sierra, Juan A.
Rodríguez-Aguilar, Pablo Noriega
Blanco-Vigil, Josep-Lluís
Arcos-Rosell and Marc Esteva-Vivancos
introduces an integrated development environment that supports the
engineering of a particular type of distributed systems, namely
multi-agent systems, as electronic institutions.
The
monograph closes with some articles related to the development of
practical and real MAS systems. The first one, “The Baghera Multiagent Learning
Environment: An Educational Community of Artificial and Human Agents”,
by Sylvie Pesty
and Carine Webber,
focuses on the multiagent learning environment named Baghera, built on
a two-level multiagent architecture. The second, “Management of a Surveillance Camera System
Using Software Agents”, by Jesús
García-Herrero, Javier
Carbó-Rubiera
and José
M. Molina-López, shows a MAS system that applies data
mining techniques to learn, from real situations, how to extract
knowledge from the environment in order to detect conflictive
situations in a distributed surveillance camera system, and to improve
the cooperation between cameras. The last article, “An Agent-Based Architecture for Developing
Internet-Based Applications”, by Juan M.
Corchado-Rodríguez, Rosalía
Laza-Fidalgo and Luis F. Castillo-Ossa,
presents a practical application of an-agent based architecture, which
has been developed using the methodological framework defined by
case-based reasoning systems.
Let
us finally express our thanks to all the authors for their valuable
collaboration and also to the editors of UPGRADE and Novática for the opportunity
they have given us to guestedit this monograph, with the hope that its
contents will be both interesting and useful to readers of the two
journals.
Translation
by Steve
Turpin
Useful
References about MAS
For those interested in obtaining more
detailed information about Multi-Agent Systems and Agent Technologies,
the following sources complement the references provided by the authors
of the papers included in this issue.
Books
- J. Ferber. Multi-Agent Systems. An Introduction to Distributed Artificial
Intelligence, Addison-Wesley, 1999.
- A.F.
García, C. Lucena, F. Zambonelli, A. Omicini, J. Castro (eds.).
"Software Engineering for Large Multiagent Systems", Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, No. 2603, Springer Verlag, April 2003.
- M.N.
Huhns, M.P. Singh, L. Gasser. Readings
in Agents, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. 2000.
- M.
Klusch. Intelligent Information
Agents. Agent-Based Information Discovery and Management on the Internet,
Springer, 1999.
- M.
Luck, R. Ashri and M. d'Inverno. Agent-Based
Software Development, Artech House, 2004.
- M.
Luck, V. Marik, O. Stepankova, R. Trappl (eds.). "Multi-Agent Systems
and Applications", Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2086,
Springer Verlag, July 2001.
- G.
Weiss (ed.). Multiagent System: A
Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, MIT
Press, 1999.
- M.
Wooldridge. An Introduction to
Multiagent Systems, John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Conferences
- AAMAS (International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems):
<http://www.aamas-conference.org/>.
- AOSE (Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
Workshops): <http://www.jamesodell.com/aose2004>.
- AOIS (Agent-Oriented Information Systems):
<http://www.aois.org/>.
- CIA (Cooperative Information Agents
Workshops): <http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/IWS-CIA-home.html>.
- ESAW (Engineering Societies in the Agents
World Workshop): <http://www.irit.fr/ESAW04/>.
- EUMAS (European Workshop on Multi-Agent
Systems): <http://www.eumas.org/>.
Journals
- Autonomous Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems (Kluwer Academic Publisher).
<http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1387-2532>.
- The Journal of Artificial
Societies and Social Simulation.
<http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html>.
Web
Sites
- Agentcities: <http://www.agentcities.org/>.
- Agentland:
<http://www.agentland.com/>.
- AgentLink:
<http://www.agentlink.org/>.
- Agents Portal:
<http://aose.ift.ulaval.ca/>.
- ASM (Agentes y Sistemas
Multiagentes): <http://agentes.ei.uvigo.es/> (in Spanish.)
- Botspot:
<http://www.botspot.com/>.
- FIPA (Foundation for
Intelligent Physical Agents): <http://www.fipa.org/>.
- ISOA (Ingeniería de
Agentes Orientada a Objetos): <http://ma.ei.uvigo.es/> (in
Spanish.)
- MultiAgent systems:
<http://www.multiagent.com/>.
- UMBC AgentWeb:
<http://agents.umbc.edu/>.
