Autonomic computing aims to deal with the complexity of todays systems by letting the system handle the complexity autonomously. This is a very hard and challenging domain because current systems are complex, distributed, interconnected and rapidly changing systems. We firmly belief that a main challenge in conquering autonomic systems is the integration of three existing research communities: ...

Organization-based Multiagent Systems are a promising way to develop complex multiagent systems. However, it is still difficult to create large multiagent organizations from scratch. Multiagent organizations created using current AOSE methodologies tend to produce ad-hoc designs that work well for small applications but are not easily reused. In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for...

This paper seeks to combine two largely independent threads of multiagent systems research—agent specification and protocols. We specify agents in terms of goal models (as used in Tropos). We specify protocols in terms of the commitments among agents. We illustrate and formalize the semantic relationship between agents and protocols by exploiting the relationship between goals and commitments. ...

Agent technologies are now being applied to the development of large scale commercial and industrial software systems Such systems are complex involving hundreds perhaps thousands of agents and there is a pressing need for system modelling techniques that permit their com plexity to be e ectively managed and principled methodologies to guide the process of system design Without adequate techniq...

A generic broker agent architecture is introduced, designed in a principled manner using the compositional development method for multi-agent systems DESIRE. A flexible, easily adaptable agent architecture results in which, in addition, facilities have been integrated that provide automated support of the agents own maintenance. Therefore, the agent is not only easily adaptable, but it shows ad...

The notion of society should play a central role in agent-oriented software engineering as a first-class abstraction around which complex systems can be designed and built as multi-agent systems. We argue that an effective agentoriented methodology should account for inter-agent aspects by providing engineers with specific abstractions and tools for the analysis and design of agent societies an...

Simulation has been regarded as the third way to represent social models, alternative to other two symbol systems: the verbal argumentation and the mathematical one. Simulation can be processed by a computer and is particularly suited for complex systems, in which the aggregate behaviour is not necessarily the sum of the sincle parts. Agent Based Modelling (ABM) is for sure the most interesting...

In Distributed Problem-solving systems a group of purposefully designed computational agents interact and co-ordinate their activities so as to jointly achieve a global task. Social co-ordination is a decentralised mechanism, that sets out from autonomous, non-benevolent agents that interact primarily to improve the degree of attainment of their local goals. One way of ensuring the effectivenes...

Modelling of complex systems is mainly based on the decomposition of these systems in autonomous elements, and the identification and definitio9n of possible interactions between these elements. For this, the agent-based approach is a modelling solution often proposed. Complexity can also be due to external events or internal to systems, whose main characteristics are uncertainty, imprecision, ...