This paper fits in the framework of Distributed Artificial Intelligence and more specifically in the field of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS).We show why antagonism should be considered inMASmade up of autonomous agents and how these systems can even turn antagonism to advantage. We set up in SWARM a MAS aimed at exploring the possibilities of antagonism, oriented towards mobile robotics applications...

We present in this paper an adaptive security model for Multi-agent systems. A security meta-model has been developed in which the traditional role concept has been extended. The new concept incorporates the need of both security management as used by role-based access control (RBAC) and agent functional behaviour in agent-oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). Our approach avoids weaknesses of ...

Despite the variety of tools to support the development of multi-agent systems (MAS), the implementation of such systems remains expensive and adhoc. This is caused by the difficulty or, in some cases, impossibility, of tailoring and successfully applying these tools due to their lack of flexibility. In this paper we propose object-oriented frameworks as a technique to build tailorable and reus...

Multi Agent Systems (MAS) comprise of a collection of autonomous and interacting agents that adapt to their environment. The agents within a MAS exhibit many of the same behaviours in the form of cross-cutting concerns. Aspects are a technology that can be used to represent cross-cutting concerns by weaving them through a system at specific points. In this paper a development process based on t...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promise a new advance in distributed computing. In MAS autonomous software agents flexibly cooperate, coordinate and compete to provide the desired function(s) of such a system. If some components of a MAS fail or do not provide the desired functionality, the system is expected to autonomously deal with this situation. It is desirable to reduce occurrences of such situ...

The era of distributed software environments is emerging and research on multi-agent systems (MAS), which tries to solve complex problems using entities called agents, is on the rise. This paper proposes an architecture-centric method for developing MAS that supports the important phases of systematic software development. In particular, this approach is geared towards supporting system propert...

The Multi-agent Systems (MAS) area, while concerning heterogeneous and open systems, has evolved towards the specification of global constraints that agents are supposed to follow. A subset of these constraints are known as organisation of the MAS. This paper describes a software implementation, called S-Moise, that tries to fill the gap between the organisational constraints and the agents aut...

Stability is perhaps the most desired feature in the systems that we design. It is important for us to be able to predict the response of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) to various environmental conditions prior to its actual deployment. The Chli-DeWilde agent stability measure views a MAS as a discrete time Markov chain with a potentially unknown transition probabilities. A MAS is considered to be ...

Model-driven engineering (MDE), implicitly based upon meta-model principles, is gaining more and more attention in software systems due to its inherent benefits. Its use normally improves the quality of the developed systems in terms of productivity, portability, inter-operability and maintenance. Therefore, its exploitation for the development of multi-agent systems (MAS) emerges in a natural ...

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...