Reconfigurability and mutability are features frequently found in agents operating in heterogeneous computing environment. At the same time, they pose major challenges to the software engineering process. In this paper we review these challenges and discuss their implications towards the agent oriented software engineering methodologies. We propose a set of extensions to the Gaia agent-oriented...

Several characteristics distinguish today's complex software systems from "traditional" ones. Examples in different areas show that these characteristics, already the focus of agent-oriented software engineering research, influence many application domains. These characteristics will impact how software systems are modeled and engineered. We are on the edge of a revolutionary shift of paradigm,...

Holonic multiagent systems offers a promising software engineering approach for developping applications in complex domains. However the process of building MASs and HMASs is radically different from the process of building more traditional software systems and so introduces new design and development issues. Against this background, this paper introduces organization-oriented abstractions for ...

Holonic multiagent systems offers a promising software engineering approach for developping applications in complex domains. However the process of building MASs and HMASs is radically different from the process of building more traditional software systems and so introduces new design and development issues. Against this background, this paper introduces organization-oriented abstractions for ...

As building large-scale software systems is complex, several software engineering paradigms have been devised. Agent oriented paradigm is one of the most predominant contributions to the field of software engineering and has the potential to significantly improve current practice of the field. The paradigm should be elaborated both practically and conceptually. Most existing agent oriented fram...

Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is defined as a new trend in computing with methodologies and modeling techniques for integrating agent entities in the software system, proposed to answer the increasingly complex distributed, large, open, dynamic, unpredictable, heterogeneous, and highly interactive application environments. Motivated by at least two main fields in computer science, ...

Several concerns in the development of multi-agent systems (MASs) cannot be represented in a modular fashion. In general, they inherently affect several system modules and cannot be explicitly captured based on existing software engineering abstractions. These crosscutting concerns encompass internal agent properties and systemic properties, such as learning, code mobility, error handling, and ...

In recent years, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies are proposed to develop complex distributed systems based upon the agent paradigm. The implementation for such systems has usually the form of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Testing of MAS is a challenging task because these systems are often programmed to be autonomous and deliberative, and they operate in an open world, whi...