The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, ent- prise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software is to be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on di?- ent platforms, without recompilation, and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and its users. Furthermore, software must be robust and ̈ autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with a minimum of overhead and interference. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of software systems. They o?er higher-level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, p- ception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which need conceptual modelling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, tra- action control, adaptive work?ows, brokering and integration of disparate inf- mation sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and ?exible treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more e?ective requirements an- ysis and architectural/detailed design.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2009, held in Budapest, Hungary, in May 2009 as part of AAMAS 2009, the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous initial submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers have been organized into three sections on multi-agent organizations, concrete development techniques, and - one step higher - going beyond the concrete technique and proposing a development method for designing concrete types of systems. This state-of-the-art survey is rounded off by five additional lectures addressing key areas in development: agent-oriented modelling languages, implementation of MAS, testing of MAS, software processes, and formal methods for the development of MAS. They permit analysis of the current state in the generation of specifications of MAS, the way these specifications can be implemented, how they can be validated, and what steps are necessary to do so.

"The book presents, analyzes and compares the most significant methodological approaches currently available for the creation of agent-oriented software systems"--Provided by publisher.

This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2005. The 18 revised full papers were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling tools, analysis and validation tools, multiagent systems design, implementation tools, and experiences and comparative evaluations.

Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with its own thread of control, engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2007, held in Honolulu, Hawaii in May 2007 as part of AAMAS 2007. The 16 revised full papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The volume contains the papers presented at the workshop, together with papers resulting from discussions on tools and platforms. The papers have been organized into four sections on: methodology and processes, interacting heterogeneous agents, system development issues, and tools and case studies.

With this book, Onn Shehory and Arnon Sturm, together with further contributors, introduce the reader to various facets of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). They provide a selected collection of state-of-the-art findings, which combines research from information systems, artificial intelligence, distributed systems and software engineering and covers essential development aspects of agent-based systems. The book chapters are organized into five parts. The first part introduces the AOSE domain in general, including introduction to agents and the peculiarities of software engineering for developing MAS. The second part describes general aspects of AOSE, like architectural models, design patterns and communication. Next, part three discusses AOSE methodologies and associated research directions and elaborates on Prometheus, O-MaSE and INGENIAS. Part four then addresses agent-oriented programming languages. Finally, the fifth part presents studies related to the implementation of agents and multi-agent systems. The book not only provides a comprehensive review of design approaches for specifying agent-based systems, but also covers implementation aspects such as communication, standards and tools and environments for developing agent-based systems. It is thus of interest to researchers, practitioners and students who are interested in exploring the agent paradigm for developing software systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 13th Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) workshop, held at the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2012, in Valencia, Spain, in June 2012. This volume presents 9 thoroughly revised papers selected from 24 submissions as well as two invited articles by leading researchers in the field. The papers cover a broad range of topics related to software engineering of agent-based systems, with particular attention to the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with recent programming languages, platforms, and established software engineering methodologies.

Since the mid 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into a very active area of research and also commercial development activity. One of the limiting factors in industry take-up of agent-technology, however, is the lack of adequate software engineering support. The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Workshop, AOSE, focuses on the synergies and cross fertilization between software engineering and agent research. This volume presents both thoroughly revised selected papers from the AOSE 2010 workshop held at AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada in May 2010 as well as invited articles by leading researchers in the field. The papers cover a broad range of topics related to software engineering and agent-based systems, with particular attention to the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with conventional engineering approaches on the one hand, and to the integration of agent-oriented software engineering and methodologies with conventional engineering processes on the other hand.

Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with its own thread of control, engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. The papers represent a state-of-the-art report of current research in this field, which is of critical importance in facilitating industry take-up of powerful agent technologies. This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2008, held in Estoril, Portugal, in May 2008 as part of AAMAS 2008. The 20 revised full papers were carefully selected from 50 initial submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers have been organized into four sections on: multi-agent organizations, method engineering and software development processes, testing and debugging, as well as tools and case studies.

Nowadays, engineering large-scale software systems means dealing with complex systems composed of pervasive software components that move around and adapt to nondeterministic and open environments, like the Internet, in order to achieve systems design goals through the coordination of autonomously distributed services. The agent metaphor, in particular software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), constitutes a promising approach for covering most of the software development life cycle, from conceptual modeling and requirements specification to architectural definition, design, and implementation. This book presents 17 carefully reviewed papers arranged in order to provide a coherent survey of how to exploit agent properties and MAS issues in today's software systems. The book offers the following topical sections: - software engineering foundations - requirements engineering and software architecture - coordination and mobility - reuse -dependability -empirical studies and applications