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

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.

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. Reflecting the importance of agent properties in today's software systems, the papers in this book illustrate recent developments in specific issues and practical experience.

The 12 thoroughly reviewed and revised full papers are organized in topical sections on fault tolerance, exception handling and diagnosis, security and trust, verification and validation, as well as early development phases and software reuse. Some of the papers were initially presented at the 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-agent Systems, SELMAS 2006, held in Shanghai, China in May 2006 in association with ICSE 2006. After the workshop edition, it was decided to extend its scope, and to invite several of the workshop participants to write chapters based on their original position papers, as well as other leading researchers in the area to prepare additional chapters, thus describing the most recent developments in the field of software engineering for multi-agent systems.