Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems.

Agent-based computing is a promising approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, despite the great deal of research in the area, a number of challenges still need to be faced (i) to make agent-based computing a widely accepted paradigm in software engineering practice, and (ii) to turn agent-oriented software abstractions into practical tools for facing the complexity of modern application areas. In this paper, after a short introduction to the key concepts of agent-based computing (as they pertain to software engineering), we characterise the emerging key issues in multiagent systems (MASs) engineering. In particular, we show that such issues can be analysed in terms of three different ‘‘scales of observation’’, i.e., in analogy with the scales of observation of physical phenomena, in terms of micro, macro, and meso scales. Based on this characterisation, we discuss, for each scale of observation, what are the peculiar engineering issues arising, the key research challenges to be solved, and the most promising research directions to be explored in the future.

This paper introduces Agent Factory, a cohesive framework supporting a structured approach to the development and deployment of agent-oriented applications. We describe Agent Factory together with an accompanying agent development methodology. We detail the key attributes of Agent Factory, namely: visual design, design reuse, behaviour enactment, migration, and ubiquity. Agent Factory functionality is exercised by way of a case study. We offer cross comparison of our system with exemplar agent prototyping environments.

In this paper we start from the consideration that high level interaction between entities like web services has very different properties with respect to the interaction between objects at the lower level of programming languages in the object oriented paradigm. In particular, web services, for security, usability and user adaptability reasons, offer different operations to different users by means of access control and keep track of the state of the interaction with each user by means of sessions. The current vision in object orientation, instead, considers attributes and operations of objects as being objective and independent from the interaction with another object, which is sessionless. To introduce these features in the interaction between objects directly in object oriented programming languages, we take inspiration from how access control is regulated by means of roles. Roles allow objects to offer different operations depending on the type of the role, of the type and identity of the player of the role, and to define session-aware interaction. We start from a definition of roles given in ontologies and knowledge representation and we discuss how this definition of roles can be introduced in Java, building our language powerJava.

Abstract. AOSE methodologies and models borrow various abstractions and concepts from the organization and sociology disciplines. Although they all view multi-agent system as organized society, the organizational abstractions, assumptions, concepts, and models in them are actually used in different ways. It is, therefore desirable to have a systematic way of analyzing and comparing the organizational and social concepts in AOSE. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we describe and define the modeling construct levels and the social premises of multi-agent system that should be modeled and analyzed when developing multi-agent system, identify and classify categories of organizational and social concepts in AOSE literature that are used to deal with them from standpoints of organization abstractions. Secondly, we analyze some methodologies and models in AOSE, explain how the organizational and social concepts are used to specify and analyze multi-agent system with various social premises in different levels. 1.

Abstract: UML 2.0 is the upcoming standard of the OMG for specifying object-oriented software systems. In this paper we will show how UML 2.0 can be applied for the specification of agent-based systems. Moreover we will give a short overview on existing agent methodologies to have a reference what has to be specified in such systems. The paper concludes with some outlook for further research and open issues for specifying agents with UML 2.0. Keywords: UML 2.0, Agent-based Systems, agent-oriented Software Engineering

We believe that tool support is very important for any methodology. In this paper we describe PDT (Prometheus Design Tool) which supports the design of an intelligent agent system using the Prometheus methodology. We describe how PDT supports the various stages of Prometheus through various means such as consistency checking, support for entity propagation, and hierarchical views. We will also describe work that is currently in progress which involves the development of a plug-in for Eclipse with the aim of creating a single integrated development environment which will support the complete development cycle of an agent system from design to deployment. 1.

Future large-scale software development projects will require engineering support for a diverse range of software quality attributes, such as privacy and openness. It is not feasible to create one monolithic methodology to support all possible quality attributes. Instead, we expect AOSE methodologies to be created and reused in a modular way. A modular approach enables developers to build custom project-specific methodologies from AOSE features in the same way applications are built from reusable off-the-shelf components.

The separation between analysis and design phases has long been advocated in software engineering literature. There has been active interest in the the area of agent oriented software engineering but the methodologies developed do not focus on a clear separation between the two phases. Furthermore, existing agent oriented methodologies tend to be tied to a particular design architecture and applicable only for small systems. In this paper, we describe a goal and role based analysis methodology that is both unbiased towards any design architecture and is scalable. The model is derived from improvements to the ROADMAP methodology for agent oriented systems developed at the University of Melbourne. We also present REBEL- a CASE tool developed to support the methodology. Furthermore, several examples and experiences with the method are discussed. We conclude by comparing analysis models of other agent oriented methodologies to ours.

Holonic multiagent systems (HMAS) offer a promising software engineering approach for developing complex open software systems. However the process of building Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and HMAS is mostly different from the process of building more traditional software systems as it introduces new design and development challenges. This paper introduces an agent-oriented software process for engineering complex systems called ASPECS. ASPECS is based on a holonic organisational metamodel and provides a step-by-step guide from requirements to code allowing the modelling of a system at different levels of details using a set of refinement methods. This paper details the entire ASPECS development process and provides a set of methodological guidelines for each process activity. A complete case study is also used to illustrate the design process and the associated notations. ASPECS uses UML as a modelling language. Because of the specific needs of agents and holonic organisational design, the UML semantics and notation are used as reference points, but they have been extended by introducing