Multi-agent systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over traditional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today’s corporate IT applications such as e-business systems, Web services, or enterprise knowledge bases. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional rather than object, functional, or implementation-oriented...

The key role of environment as a first-class abstraction in the engineering of MAS (multi-agent systems) is today generally acknowledged in the MAS community. However, the support for the notion of environment in today AOSE (agent-oriented software engineering) methodologies is still either absent, weak, or incomplete at best. In this paper we first review, classify and compare existing AOSE me...

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a language that helps to visualize, design and document models of software systems. It represents a collection of the best engineering practices that have proven successful in modelling large and complex systems. UML is widely used in designing large and reliable software systems required by banks and other corporate bodies. Students are encouraged to wor...

The MESSAGE methodology has shown that the application of meta-models in the development of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) facilitates the integration of current software engineering processes and the use of agent technology concepts in analysis and design activities. This paper presents an extension to the MESSAGE meta-models and how to conduct the modelling (i.e., instantiation of the meta-models ...

In this paper, I will discuss the conceptual foundation of agentoriented software development by relating the fundamental elements of the agentoriented view to those of other, well established programming paradigms, especially the object-oriented approach. Furthermore, I will motivate the concept of autonomy as the basic property of the agent-oriented school and discuss the development history ...

The metaphors of autonomous agents and agent societies have the potential to make a signi cant impact on the processes of analysis design and development of complex software systems on the Internet In this chapter we concentrate predominantly on agent societies and show how work on coordination models and technologies provides a powerful framework for the engineering of Internet based multi age...

In this paper, I will show how the now popular concept of software patterns can be used in agent-oriented software engineering. To this end, I will present a possible structure of a pattern catalog for agent-oriented patterns and introduce a pattern description scheme that accounts for the specific needs of agent patterns. Then, I will provide two examples for how this scheme can be used to des...

ion refers to the level of the concepts used in a specification. The ideal abstraction is sufficiently high-level to hide details and reduce complexity, yet sufficiently low-level to support drawing the necessary conclusions. Tropos and i* offer high-level abstractions such as goals, capabilities, and goal dependencies. Sommerville et al. [2009] apply high-level notions of responsibility and de...

The diversity of multi-agent systems creates the need for tools and methodologies to achieve their designs. UML has been proposed as a new approach for agent modeling, yet it does not support the concept of agents. This paper describes a UML profile that we defined for Multi-Agent Systems MAS. In order to support the definition of this profile the ArgoUML tool was extended. The extended tool al...

Roles are an essential concept within agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). Role definitions in current AOSE methodologies are usually claimed to be for use at the requirements level. However, in most methodologies, they are too low level, specifying too much detail. In this paper, we present a "higher level" role specification. The role specification method described in this paper works ...