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Agent Oriented Software Engineering

Themes

Multi-agent system technology represents an exciting new means of analysing, designing and building complex software. We believe it has the potential to significantly improve current practice in software engineering and to extend the range of applications which can feasibly be tackled. Yet, to date, there has been no systematic analysis of what makes agents effective as a solution technology. In seeking to rectify this omission, this research programme seeks to identify the reasons why agents are effective and useful and to devise systematic methodologies for building robust and reliable systems.

Among our major developments to date is the GAIA methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. This is one of the first methodologies that has been specifically developed for agent-based systems. However we have also developed a methodology that is specifically targetted at cooperative agents in flexible manufacturing control, and have worked on the pragmatics of developing agent-oriented systems, based on over a decade of experience in building real-world systems.

Publications

F. M. T. Brazier, B. M. Dunin-Keplicz, N. R. Jennings, and J. Treur: "DESIRE: Modelling Multi-Agent Systems in a Compositional Formal Framework" , Int Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 6 (1), 1997, 67-94.

F.M.T. Brazier, B. Dunin-Keplicz, N.R. Jennings and J. Treur: "Modelling Distributed Industrial Processes in a Multi-Agent Framework" , in: Cooperative Knowledge Processing (eds. S. Kirn and G. M. P. O'Hare) Springer Verlag, 1996, 212-229.

F. Brazier, B.D. Keplicz, N.R. Jennings and J. Treur : "Formal Specification of Multi-Agent Systems: a Real-World Case" , First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS'95), San Francisco, CA., June 12-14, 1995, 25-32.

S. Bussmann, N. R. Jennings, and M. J. Wooldridge (2001) "On the identification of agents in the design of production control systems" in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (eds. P. Ciancarini and M. Wooldridge) Springer Verlag, 141-162.

J. Gonzalez-Palacios and M. Luck, A Framework for Patterns in Gaia: A case-study with Organisations, in Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, New York, NY, 2004.

N. R. Jennings (2001) "Building complex, distributed systems: the case for an agent-based approach" Comms. of the ACM, 44 (4) 35-41.

N. R. Jennings (2000) "On Agent-Based Software Engineering" Artificial Intelligence, 117 (2) 277-296.

N. R. Jennings (1999) "Agent-based Computing: Promise and Perils" Proc. 16th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-99), Stockholm, Sweeden. (Computers and Thought award invited paper) 1429-1436.

N. R. Jennings (1999) "Agent-Oriented Software Engineering" Proc. 12th Int Conf on Industrial and Engineering Applications of AI, Cairo, Egypt, 4-10. (Invited paper) [Also appearing in Proc. 9th European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World (MAAMAW-99), Valencia, Spain 1-7 (Invited paper)]

N. R. Jennings and M Wooldridge (2001) "Agent-Oriented Software Engineering" in Handbook of Agent Technology (ed. J. Bradshaw) AAAI/MIT Press. (to appear)

M. Luck, R. Ashri and M. d'Inverno, Agent-Based Software Development, Artech House, 208 pp, 2004.

S. Miles, M. Joy and M. Luck, Towards a Methodology for Coordination Mechanism Selection in Open Systems, in Engineering Societies in the Agents World III: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop, P. Petta, R. Tolksdorf, F. Zambonelli (eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence2577, Springer-Verlag, 241-256, 2003.

S. Miles, M. Joy and M. Luck, Designing Agent-Oriented Systems by Analysing Agent Interactions. In Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Paolo Ciancarini and Michael Wooldridge, editors, 171-183, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 1957, 2001.

M. J. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings, (1999) "Software Engineering with Agents: Pitfalls and Pratfalls" IEEE Internet Computing 3 (3) 20-27.

M. J. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings (1998) "Pitfalls of Agent-Oriented Development" Proc 2nd Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents (Agents-98), Minneapolis, USA, 385-391.

M. Wooldridge, N. R. Jennings, and D. Kinny (2000) "The Gaia Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design" Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 3 (3) 285-312.

M. Wooldridge, N. R. Jennings, and D. Kinny (1999) "A Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design" Proc. 3rd Int Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents-99) Seattle, WA, 69-76.

F. Zambonelli, N. R. Jennings, A. Omicini and M. Wooldridge (2001) "Agent-Oriented Software Engineering for Internet Applications" in Coordination of Internet Agents (eds. A. Omicini, F. Zambonelli, M. Klusch and R. Tolksdorf) Springer Verlag, 326-346.

F. Zambonelli, N. R. Jennings, and M. Wooldridge (2000) "Organisational Abstractions for the Analysis and Design of Multi-Agent Systems" Proc. 1st Int. Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, 127-141.

F. Zambonelli, N. R. Jennings, and M. Wooldridge (2001) "Organisational rules as an abstraction for the analysis and design of multi-agent systems" Int J. of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering 11 (3). (to appear)