Ebook: Agent-Oriented Software Engineering III: Third International Workshop, AOSE 2002 Bologna, Italy, July 15, 2002 Revised Papers and Invited Contributions

Over the past three decades, software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding of the characteristics of complexity in software. It is now widely recognised thatinteraction is probably the most important single char- teristic of complex software. Software architectures that contain many dyna- cally interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and eng- ing in complex coordination protocols, are typically orders of magnitude more complex to correctly and e?ciently engineer than those that simply compute a function of some input through a single thread of control. Unfortunately, it turns out that many (if not most) real-world applications have precisely these characteristics. As a consequence, a major research topic in c- puter science over at least the past two decades has been the development of tools and techniques to model, understand, and implement systems in which interaction is the norm. Indeed, many researchers now believe that in future computation itself will be understood as chie?y a process of interaction.

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This state-of-the-art survey examines the credentials of agent-based approaches as a software engineering paradigm. The 15 revised full papers presented together with two invited articles were carefully selected from 49 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement for the Third International Workshop on Agent-Oriented  Software Engineering, AOSE 2002, held in Bologna, Italy, during AAMAS 2002. The papers address all current issues in the field of software agents and multi-agent systems relevant for software engineering; they are organized in topical sections on - modeling, specification, and validation - patterns, architectures, and reuse - UML and agent systems - methodologies and tools - positions and perspectives