One aspect of multi-agent systems (MAS) that has been only partially studied is their role in software engineering, and in particular their merit as a software architecture style. As we demonstrate, multi-agent systems developed to date have several common architectural characteristics, even though differences in their design and implementation result in variations in their strengths and weakne...

Multi-actor systems are most often designed for a purpose, to perform one or more tasks, to achieve one or more goals for human users. Current research on system design focuses primarily on multi-agent system (MAS) functionality, structure and (emergent) behaviour. Very little research focuses on interaction between human users and systems. Trust in multi-actor systems, however, mandates consid...

Testing software agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) needs suitable techniques to evaluate agent’s autonomous behaviours as well as distribution, social and deliberative properties, which are particular to these systems. This paper reviews testing methods and techniques with respect to the MAS properties they are able to address. For this purpose, we provide a reference framework that provides...

Open Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are formed by autonomous and heterogeneous agents that may pursue different and even conflicting goals. Therefore, no assumption can be a priori made about their behaviours. Thus, it is needed to constrain the potential excesses of agent autonomous behaviour by means of regulation of agent interaction. Because of this, “social” notions, such as organizations, inst...

The extension of our research on analysis of a single agent or agent communities combining advanced methods of visualization with traditional AI techniques is presented in this paper. Even though this approach can be used for arbitrary Multi-Agent System (MAS), it was primarily developed to analyze systems falling into Artificial Life domain. Traditional methods are becoming insufficient as Mul...

In this paper we present mobile Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) as a specific paradigm to design intelligent and distributed applications in the context of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). We discuss how mobility, coupled with MAS, can be useful to meet the requirements of AmI. Indeed, the main features of mobile MAS, such as natural distribution of the system, inherent intelligence of the agents, and the...

With the recent rapid growth of interest in Multi-Agent Systems(MAS), has come an associated difficulty modelling basic terms, concepts. In this paper, the underlying homogeneousness between human being (society) and software agent (MAS, Multi-Agent System) is opened out, based on which a new definition and architecture for agent is proposed. An agent is made of certain soft genes and roles. Su...

While Multi Agent Systems (MAS) attracted a great deal of attention in the field of software engineering, with its promises of capturing complex systems, they re­ main far away from commercial popularity mainly due to the lack of a MAS method­ ology that is accessible for commercial developers. In this paper we present a prac­ tical method for developing MAS that we believe will enable not only...

Enterprise integration through integrated business information systems (IBIS) is necessary to achieve agility in the current age of hyper-competition. Multi-agent systems (MAS) provide a new paradigm for IBIS development. In this paper, we review the IBIS modeling and MAS literatures and find that the MAS paradigm provides an excellent approach for modeling and implementing IBIS systems. We syn...

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 ...