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.

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.

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.

"The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling is an introduction to agent-oriented software development for students and for software developers who are interested in learning about new software engineering techniques."--Foreword.

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

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 volume is the eighth in the Intelligent Agents series associated with the ATAL workshops. These workshops on “Agent Theories, Architectures, and L- guages” have established themselves as a tradition, and play the role of small but internationally well-known conferences on the subject, where besides theory per se also integration of theory and practice is in focus. Speci?cally, ATAL - dresses issues of theories of agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for realizing agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent-based systems. ATAL 2001 featured two special tracks in which both the more theoretical / formal and the more practical aspects were present, viz. “Formal Theories of Negotiation”, organized by Frank Dignum, and “Agents for Hand-Held, Mobile, or Embedded Devices”, organized by Tim Finin. There was also an extra session on RoboCup Rescue, organized and presented by Satoshi Tadokoro and Ranjit Nair. ATAL 2001 attracted 68 papers from over 20 countries all over the world, of which 30 were selected for presentation at the workshop and publication in this volume. We invited two outstanding speakers: Fausto Giunchiglia (Trento, Italy) and Tom Dean (Brown, USA).

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2007, held in Athens, Greece, in October 2007. The 19 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. The papers are organized in topical sections on electronic institutions, models of complex distributed systems with agents and societies; interaction in agent societies; engineering social intelligence in multi-agent systems; trust and reputation in agent societies; analysis, design and development of agent societies.

Contains 30 papers from the SoMeT_10 international conference on new trends in software methodology, tools and techniques in Yokohama, Japan. This book offers an opportunity for the software science community to reflect on where they are and how they can work to achieve an optimally harmonized performance between the design tool and the end-user.

The main concepts and techniques of multi-agent oriented programming, which supports the multi-agent systems paradigm at the programming level. A multi-agent system is an organized ensemble of autonomous, intelligent, goal-oriented entities called agents, communicating with each other and interacting within an environment. This book introduces the main concepts and techniques of multi-agent oriented programming, (MAOP) which supports the multi-agent systems paradigm at the programming level. MAOP provides a structured approach based on three integrated dimensions, which the book examines in detail: the agent dimension, used to design the individual (interacting) entities; the environment dimension, which allows the development of shared resources and connections to the real world; and the organization dimension, which structures the interactions among the autonomous agents and the shared environment.