Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems: Research Issues and Practical Applications

✍ Scribed by Viviane Silva, Alessandro Garcia, Anarosa Brandão, Christina Chavez, Carlos Lucena (auth.), Alessandro Garcia, Carlos Lucena, Franco Zambonelli, Andrea Omicini, Jaelson Castro (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 298
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2603
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Nowadays, engineering large-scale software systems means dealing with complex systems composed of pervasive software components that move around and adapt to nondeterministic and open environments, like the Internet, in order to achieve systems design goals through the coordination of autonomously distributed services. The agent metaphor, in particular software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), constitutes a promising approach for covering most of the software development life cycle, from conceptual modeling and requirements specification to architectural definition, design, and implementation.

This book presents 17 carefully reviewed papers arranged in order to provide a coherent survey of how to exploit agent properties and MAS issues in today's software systems. The book offers the following topical sections:

- software engineering foundations

- requirements engineering and software architecture

- coordination and mobility

- reuse

-dependability

-empirical studies and applications

✦ Table of Contents

Taming Agents and Objects in Software Engineering....Pages 1-26
The Role of Roles in Designing Effective Agent Organizations....Pages 27-38
Requirements Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-agent Systems....Pages 39-56
Requirements Traceability in Agent Oriented Development....Pages 57-72
The Reflective Blackboard Pattern: Architecting Large Multi-agent Systems....Pages 73-93
A Declarative Approach to Agent-Centered Context-Aware Computing in Ad Hoc Wireless Environments....Pages 94-109
Engineering Mobility in Large Multi Agent Systems: A Case Study in Urban Traffic Management....Pages 110-122
Sustainable Information Ecosystems....Pages 123-138
Achieving the Promise of Reuse with Agent Components....Pages 139-147
Application-Specific Reuse of Agent Roles....Pages 148-164
Assisting the Development of Aspect-Based Multi-agent Systems Using the Smartweaver Approach....Pages 165-181
Dynamic and Adaptive Replication for Large-Scale Reliable Multi-agent Systems....Pages 182-198
Achieving Software Robustness via Large-Scale Multiagent Systems....Pages 199-215
What Can Cellular Automata Tell Us about the Behavior of Large Multi-agent Systems?....Pages 216-231
The RETSINA MAS, a Case Study....Pages 232-250
Secure Multi-agent Coordination in a Network Monitoring System....Pages 251-266
Towards Monitored Data Consistency and Business Processing Based on Declarative Software Agents1....Pages 267-284

✦ Subjects

Software Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Programming Techniques; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics)