Ebook: Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems IV: Research Issues and Practical Applications

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.

This book presents a coherent and 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.

The 15 thoroughly reviewed and revised full papers are organized in topical sections on context-awareness, coordination, dependability, modeling, as well as requirements and software architecture. Most of the papers were initially presented at the 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems, SELMAS 2005, held in Saint Louis, MO, USA in May 2005 in association with ICSE 2005. Other papers were invited to describe the most recent developments in the field of software engineering for multi-agent systems.