Engineering Environment-Mediated Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Although there is a huge amount of work and valuable proposals about agent oriented software engineering, it seems that the paradigm has not been yet widely adopted by software industry. Some claim that there is a need for a killer application showing clearly the benefits of multi-agent systems with respect to other techniques. Others may consider the approach as too academic to be applied in real projects. However, in our opinion, the answer may be found in the simple explanation of lessons learned while developing applications with agent-orientation, and confronting these with object and component oriented solutions, especially when faced to the development of complex systems. This paper discusses contributions of multi-agent systems from a software engineering perspective, as a way to put in value some of the properties of the agent paradigm in the development of complex software systems.