MAMSY: A Management Tool for Multi-Agent Systems

Over the last few years multi-agent systems have proved to be one of the most productive areas for Artificial Intelligence researchers. There are still several subjects that are under research, i.e security, agent programming languages and core enhancements for efficient and scalable systems. Although some advancements have been made in this area, most multi-agent systems still remain under the closed multiagent system category, where the whole system is owned by a private user or organization. One of the main goals in multi-agent research is producing open multi-agent systems. According to [15], an open multi-agent system is a system where elements can be removed or can be added during the runtime. We are more interested in a specialization of such systems: open multi-agent systems where the whole system may not be owned by a private user or organization. From now on we will refer to this system category. As people extend the system, they will increasingly become interested in monitoring and controlling their part of the system. This is where the term management comes in, having been commonly used in software engineering where management systems are the most frequent type of application. The term management acquires a special meaning when it is applied to multi-agent systems. In multi-agent system management, the items that are managed are resources. To our knowledge extent, there is no formal definition for the term resource in multi-agent systems thus we decided to provide one.