This special section on "Engineering Agent-Based Social Simulations" aims to represent the current state of the art in using Software Engineering (SE) methods in ABSS. It includes a mixture of theoretically oriented papers that describe frameworks, notations and methods adapted from SE and practice-oriented papers that demonstrate the application of SE methods in real world ABSS projects.

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 eBusiness 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, ...

Over the last few years, two advances in agent-oriented software engineering have had a significant impact. The first is the identification of interaction and coordination as the central focus of multiagent systems design and the second is the realization that the multiagent organization is distinct from the individual agents that populate the system. Also, the evolution of new, more powerful h...

This special section on "Engineering Agent-Based Social Simulations" aims to represent the current state of the art in using Software Engineering (SE) methods in ABSS. It includes a mixture of theoretically oriented papers that describe frameworks, notations and methods adapted from SE and practice-oriented papers that demonstrate the application of SE methods in real world ABSS projects.

Testing is an important process that can assure the quality and the correct functionality of the multi agent systems (MAS). Multiple testing methods in agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) have been introduced in recent years. Although the quality of the system is dependent on the quality of the applied test method, very little attention has been paid to evaluating these testing methods. ...

Software systems are subject to increasing complexity and in need of efficient structuring. Multi-agent system research has come up with approaches for an organization-oriented comprehension of software systems. However, when it comes to the collective level of organizational analysis, multi-agent system technology lacks clear development concepts. To overcome this problem while preserving the ...

The emergence of large information systems has pushed software specification into the area of business modelling to adequately capture and consider business requirements. At the same time, there has been a move toward techniques for specifying the behaviours of and the knowledge associated with intelligent agents as these are increasingly found as important components of those information syste...

Agent-oriented design has become one of the most active areas in the field of software engineering. The agent concept provides a focal point for accountability and responsibility for coping with the complexity of software systems both during design and execution (Yu, 2001). It is deemed that software engineering challenges in developing large scale distributed systems can be overcome by an agen...

Systems development methodologies continue to be a central area of research in software engineering. As the nature of applications and systems usage move increasingly towards open networked environments, not only are new methodologies required, but new ways for evaluating methodologies for these new environments are also required. The agent-oriented approach to software engineering introduces c...

We review some of the history of Software Engineering since 1968 and discuss some the underlying concepts of Structured and ObjectOriented Software Development, noting that they don't offer means of capturing and analyzing design spaces for the software-to-be. We then introduce Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering concepts adopted from the KAOS and i* modelling frameworks, noting key ideas. W...