A social-driven design of e-business system

Abstract

In the last few years, software applications have increased in complexity and in stakeholder's expectations principally due to new Internet-centric application areas such as e-business, web services, ubiquitous computing, and peer-to-peer networks. Multi-agent systems (MAS) architectures have gained popularity for developing such software. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining frameworks for agent-based architectural design. Considering that a MAS architecture is conceived as a society of software agents, this paper overviews SKwyRL, a social-driven design framework dedicated to build up agent-based systems. The framework proposes a modern approach based on organizational structures and social patterns to define agent architectures notably in the context of e-business system design. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.