Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is one of the latest contenders in the historic development of programming paradigms. AOSE promises to be an exciting new software engineering approach with techniques more suited to the construction of large, complex software systems than those techniques belonging to the object oriented approach. To be a viable concept, there is a need for a uniform ...

This paper characterizes the complexity of a knowledge worker’s environment in today’s business enterprise. This environment, with its ever-changing landscape of tasks, processes, tools, and technologies are making prohibitive demands on the knowledge worker’s time and attention. To aid in the successful navigation of this complex environment, this paper examines usage of software agent for e-s...

Although there is a huge amount of work and valuable proposals about agent oriented software engineering, it seems that the paradigm has not been fully accepted yet by software industry. Some claim that there is a need for a killer application showing the benefits of multi-agent systems with respect to other techniques without any doubt. Others may consider the approach as too academic to be ap...

This paper presents the general aspects that motivated the construction of the MASim methodology, aimed for development of agent-based simulations. MASim employs features common to the development of agent-based software as well as to the development of simulation models. MASim is described in terms of agent-based concepts. It also borrows concepts used in mainstream software engineering proces...

With the increasing importance of complex software systems in the software industry, the need for using agent technologies to develop large-scale commercial and industrial software systems is growing rapidly. Such systems are complex and there is a pressing need for system modeling techniques to support reliable, maintainable and extensible design. G-Nets are a type of Petri net defined to supp...

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) and product-line development have delivered significant improvements in software development, promising improved reuse, agility and quality. Components can be (largely) independently developed. To further increase the independence and flexibility of components, software agent components have great promise to improve application and system construction...

Web services are the newest trend in information technology, being considered the most used alternative for building distributed open systems. Although currently Web services involve a single client–server access, the market is demanding cooperative Web services to provide a global solution. Recently software agents appear as a good option that can cope with the control of Web services composit...

Agent orientation is currently pursued primarily as a software paradigm. Software with characteristics such as autonomy, sociality, reactivity and proactivity, and communicative and cooperative abilities are expected to offer greater functionality and higher quality, in comparison to earlier paradigms such as object orientation. Agent models and languages are thus intended as abstractions of co...

Today, a high volume of goods and services is being traded using online auction systems. The growth in size and complexity of architectures to support online auctions requires the use of distributed and cooperative software techniques. In this context, the agent software development paradigm seems appropriate for their modeling, development, and implementation. This article proposes an agent-or...

The increasing sophistication of today's information era poses certain challenges to traditional information technology (IT) systems. Agent-based software technology is rapidly evolving to meet the demands of this new information era. However, before agent-based solutions can be routinely and successfully exploited in real world problems, first, certain fundamental research and software enginee...