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This article has sought to justify precisely why agent-oriented approaches are well suited to developing complex software systems in general and control systems in particular. These general points are then made concrete by showing how they apply in two very different agent-based control systems--Iber- 26 drola's electricity transportation management system and DaimlerChrysler's manufacturing line control system. In making these arguments, proponents of other software engineering paradigms can claim that the key concepts of agent-oriented computing can be reproduced using their technique. This is undoubt- edly true. Agent-oriented systems are, after all, computer programs, and all programs have the same set of computable functions. However, this misses the point. The value of a paradigm is the mindset and the techniques it provides to software engineers. In this respect, agent-oriented concepts and techniques are both well suited to developing complex, distributed systems and an extension of those currently available in other paradigms

this paper will argue that analysing, designing and implementing complex software systems as a collection of interacting, autonomous agents (i.e., as a multi-agent system [4]) affords software engineers a number of significant advantages over contemporary methods. This is not to say that agent-oriented software engineering represents a silver bullet [2]---there is no evidence to suggest it will represent an order of magnitude improvement in productivity. However, the increasing number of deployed applications [4] [8] bears testament to the potential advantages that accrue from such an approach.

Abstract—Intermodal freight transportation is defined as a system that carries freight from origin to destination by using two or more transportation modes. In this system, hubs are one of the key elements that function as transferring points of freight between different modes. The location of hubs is one of the most crucial success factors in intermodal freight transportation and needs to be considered very carefully as it has direct and indirect impacts on different stakeholders including investors, policy makers, infrastructure providers, hub operators, hub users, and the community. There have been several attempts to evaluate intermodal freight hub location decisions by using conventional multi-objective evaluation models. Only a few studies take community’s benefits into account next to the costs and it is difficult to assess the relationship between system level performance and the prefered solution for individual actors. This paper aims at developing an integral model for the evaluation of road-rail intermodal freight hub location decisions. The model comprises five dominant types of agents namely, hub operators, terminal operators, infrastructure providers, hub users, and communities. An agent based modeling approach is introduced to allow negotiation to happen in order to achieve a global objective. The paper outlines the methodology to be used. It presents a conceptual design and an illustrative case study for an agent based model for the decision making process for planning the location of intermodal freight hubs. Index terms: Agent-Based Model, intermodal freight hub, ontology, decision making, socio-technical system I I.

Application layer networks are software architectures that allow the provisioning of services requiring a huge amount of resources by connecting large numbers of individual computers. Controlling the resource allocation in those networks is nearly impossible using a centralized arbitrator. Decentralized concepts have been proposed for peer-to-peer networks. Achieving the network functionality, however, is often more important than reducing its overall cost. We propose a decentralized mechanism for resource allocation in application layer networks based on the economic paradigm of the Catallaxy, against a centralized mechanism using an arbitrator object. In both approaches, software agents buy and sell network services and resources to and from each other. We describe the main ideas of our approach and the implementation of the CATNET simulator for application layer networks to evaluate the both centralized and decentralized coordination. 1.