A Multi-agent Approach to Professional Software Engineering

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) and product-line development have delivered significant improvements in software development, promising improved reuse, agility and quality. Components can be (largely) independently developed. To further increase the independence and flexibility of components, software agent components have great promise to improve application and system construction. Built on conventional distributed computing and application management platforms, on web service technology or within a P2P infrastructure, agent components are effective for independent development, for scalable and robust systems and dynamic evolution of features. There are many kinds of software agents, with differing characteristics such as mobility, autonomy, collaboration, persistence and intelligence, each offering greater flexibility than traditional components. We will discuss agent technology and those elements that enable more robust, scalable and evolutionary systems, and the application of agent components to personal assistants and software engineering environments.

We briefly review the current state of play in the area of agent-based software engineering, and then consider “what next?”. We discuss a range of market- ing activities that will together help in making people from other communities aware of work in this area. We then outline a number of research topics that are seen as vital to the future of the field. Although (as always) more research is needed, recent progress in both research and industrial adoption has been most encouraging, and the future of agent-based software engineering looks bright.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2001

First NTNU CSGSC, 2001

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.

First International Workshop Aose 2000 on Agent Oriented Software Engineering, 2001

It has previously been claimed that agent technologies facilitate software development by virtue of their high-level abstractions for interactions. We address a more specific characterization and utility. We believe that it is important to distinguish agent technologies from other software technologies by virtue of a set of unique software characteristics. This is in contrast to much in the literature that concentrates on high-level characteristics that could be implemented with a variety of software techniques. Agent-based software engineering (ABSE), for at least an important class of agents and applications, can be characterized by both model and inner/outer language components. Our experience in developing applications based on longterm asynchronous exchange of agent messages, similar to typical email usage, leads us to believe these unique characteristics facilitate useful software development practices. The utility derives from a stratification of change among the components, ease of collaborative change and debugging even during runtime due to asynchronous text parsing-based message exchange, and reuse of the outer language as well as generic agents as a programming environment. 1

2000

ABSTRACT Agent-oriented computing is emerging as a powerful new paradigm that might be the cornerstone for the next generation of software like e-business systems. Naturally, defining accurate development methodologies for such emerging systems is becoming one promising area in software development. Up to now, software development techniques have been traditionally implementation-driven in the sense that the programming paradigm of the day dictated the design and requirements analysis techniques used.

2006

Several concerns in the development of multi-agent systems (MASs) cannot be represented in a modular fashion. In general, they inherently affect several system modules and cannot be explicitly captured based on existing software engineering abstractions. These crosscutting concerns encompass internal agent properties and systemic properties, such as learning, code mobility, error handling, and context-awareness.

Abstract. In this paper we discuss first explorations about exploiting the Eclipse framework in the context of agent-oriented programming, using an agent-oriented programming platform called JaCa. At first, we discuss how the Eclipse framework can be naturally exploited for designing and developing a modular feature-rich agent-oriented IDE, to represent, manipulate, inspect JaCa programs directly in terms of such agentoriented abstractions defined by the JaCa computation/programming model.

2004

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.