Beyond the Design Stance: The Intention of Agent-Based Engineering

This paper is a manifesto in progress. We are two researchers who frequently use agents in anger to do our jobs. Yet we have been having trouble finding value in most of the papers that get published in the field of Multi Agent Systems (MAS). This paper represents our attempt to understand why not. We will start with the most basic question: Why do people use Multi Agent Systems? One answer is that it’s not clear they do. We still don’t see very many industrial applications of agent technology beyond robotics and AI for computer games, and neither of those use anything like what we generally know as MAS. But there are several good reasons that someone might: