The development of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) involves special concerns, such as interaction, adaptation, autonomy, among others. Many of these concerns are overlapping, crosscut each other and the agent’s basic functionality. Over the last few years, several methodologies and implementation frameworks have been proposed to support agent-oriented software engineering. Although these approaches ...

Multiagent systems (MAS) are spreading, in the academic world as well as in industry. Nevertheless, MAS design is still a problem. The agent community now has some experience. So, we considered existing techniques allowing formalisation and reuse of the experience. We particularly considered object-oriented techniques, for they are close to the MAS paradigm, for they are widely used to implemen...

The concept of agent has been successfully used in a wide range of applications such as Robotics, e-commerce, agent-assisted user training, military transport or health-care. The origin of this concept can be located in 1977, when Carl Hewitt proposed the idea of an interactive object called actor. This actor was defined as a computational agent, which has a mail address and a behaviour (Hewitt...

This dissertation deals with ontology based knowledge representation and its use in multi agent systems. It is well known that knowledge has an immense value in all kinds of businesses and people's every day life. The work presented in this thesis aims to make a stronger connection between knowledge management (KM) and multi-agent systems (MAS), mainly by bringing work done in the semantic web ...

Engineering multi-agent systems (MAS) is known to be a complex task. One of the reasons lays in the complexity to combine multiple concerns that a MAS has to address, such as system functionality, coordination, robustness, etc. A well-recognized approach to manage system complexity is the use of self-adaptation (SA). Self-adaptation extends a system with support to monitor and adapt itself to r...

Both, research and application development in the area of multi-agent systems currently undertakes rapid expansion. In order to use multi-agent technology in real applications, it is inevitable to ensure security, integrity and authenticity of inter-agent communication. Various securitysystems, developed for different applications have been used in multi-agent system (MAS). Alternatively, MAS a...

This paper introduces an architecture-centric object-oriented design method for MAS (Multi-Agent Systems) using the extended UML (Unified Modeling Language). The UML extension is based on design principles that are derived from characteristics of MAS and concept of software architecture which helps to design reusable and wellstructured multi-agent architecture. The extension allows one to use o...

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are composed of heterogeneous agent with distinct agent properties, such as adaptation, mobility, collaboration, roles, and learning. The agent paradigm per se is not new since it has its roots in the Artificial Intelligent research. However, an important issue in getting the agent technology into mainstream software development is the creation of appropriate software ...

Verifying that agent interactions in a multiagent system (MAS) are compliant to a given global protocol is of paramount importance for most systems, and is mandatory for safety-critical applications. Runtime verification requires a proper formalism to express such a protocol, a possibly non intrusive mechanism for capturing agent interactions, and a method for verifying that captured interactio...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) emerged as a promising approach for developing complex and distributed systems. However, tools that support development of MASs are essential for this approach is effectively exploited in industrial context. Therefore, there is a need for tools for the modeling of MAS, because create and manipulate models without support of an appropriate environment are tedious and er...