Agent-based software engineering

The technology of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems seems set to radically alter the way in which complex, distributed, open systems are conceptualized and implemented. The purpose of this paper is to consider the problem of building a multi-agent system as a software engineering enterprise. The article focuses on three issues: (i) how agents might be specified; (ii) how these specifications might be refined or otherwise transformed into efficient implementations; and (iii) how implemented agents and multi-agent systems might subsequently be verified, in order to show that they are correct with respect to their specifications. These issues are discussed with reference to a number of casestudies. The article concludes by setting out some issues and open problems for future