Shaping the emerging paradigm of agent-orientation: Special issue on agent-oriented software development methodologies

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word methodology as ‘the branch of knowledge that deals with method generally or with the methods of a particular discipline or field of study’. Subsequently, the word methodolgy also refers to ‘the study of the suitability of the techniques employed in it’. For software development methodology, the discipline or the field of study is, of course, software development. Thus, it is a branch of knowledge that deals with a method or methods of software development and the study of the suitability of the techniques employed in it. There is no doubt that methodology plays a significant role in scientific study in almost all disciplines. However, the quest for science has often led to a largely futile battle of methodologies in answer to the question: How should we do it? Unfortunately, the study of software development is no exception. The recent rapid development in web technology as well as other computer hardware and communication network technologies provides a computation planform that has never been so powerful before. How to develop software systems that effectively and efficiently utilise such a powerful platform has imposed a challenge to software development methods. The past few years has seen a rapid growth in the research on new software development methods. Agent-orientation is one of the most active and promising among them. A great amount of work has been reported in the literature on software engineering of agent-based systems. A number of methodologies of software development have been proposed and investigated based on the concept of agent, such as Gaia [1], Tropos [2], and CAMLE [3], just to mention a few. Numerous workshops on this topic have been held at various conferences; see, for example [4,5]. A new international journal on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering has also been launched [6]. However, many fundamental questions concerning agent-orientation remain open and few general consensuses on the basic issues have achieved among researchers. The current state of the research on agent-oriented software engineering is very much a battle field. This special issue is a direct result of research efforts on agent-oriented software development. In July 2005, the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodologies (AOSDM’2005) was successfully held at the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE’05) in Taipei. Five papers were presented at the workshop, which attracted more than 30 attendants with lively discussions after each presentation. There are also more than 20 other papers on related topics presented at the SEKE’05 and