Information systems of the future will have to perform well within ever-changing organizational environments. Unfortunately, existing software development methodologies (object-oriented, structured or otherwise) have traditionally been inspired by programming concepts, not organizational ones, leading to a semantic gap between the software system and its operational environment. To reduce this gap, we propose a software development methodology named Tropos which is founded on concepts used to model early requirements. Our proposal adopts the i* organizational modeling framework, which o#ers the notions of actor, goal and (actor) dependency, and uses these as a foundation to model early and late requirements, architectural and detailed design. The paper outlines Tropos phases through an e-business example, and sketches a formal language which underlies the methodology and is intended to support formal analysis. The methodology seems to complement well proposals for agent-oriented programming platforms.

A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is an organization of coordinated autonomous agents that interact in order to achieve common goals. Considering real world organizations as an analogy, this paper proposes architectural styles for MAS which adopt concepts from organization theory and strategic alliances literature. The styles are intended to represent a macro-level architecture of a MAS, and they are modeled using the i* framework which offers the notions of actor, goal and actor dependency for modeling multi-agent settings. The styles are also specified as metaconcepts in the Telos modeling language. Moreover, each style is evaluated with respect to a set of software quality attributes, such as predictability and adaptability. The paper also explores the adoption of micro-level patterns proposed elsewhere in order to give a finer-grain description of a MAS architecture. These patterns define how goals assigned to actors participating in an organizational architecture will be fulfilled by agents.

Compositional multi-agent system design is a methodological perspective on multiagent system design based on the software engineering principles process and knowledge abstraction, compositionality, reuse, specification and verification. This paper addresses these principles from a generic perspective in the context of the compositional development method DESIRE. An overview is given of reusable generic models (design patterns) for different types of agents, problem solving methods and tasks, and reasoning patterns. Examples of supporting tools are described.

This paper will lead you into the world of mobile agents, an emerging technology that makes it very much easier to design, implement, and maintain distributed systems. You will find that mobile agents reduce the network traffic, provide an effective means of overcoming network latency, and perhaps most importantly, through their ability to operate asynchronously and autonomously of the process that created them, helps you to construct more robust and fault-tolerant. Read on and let us introduce you to software agents - the mobile as well as the stationary ones. We will explain all the benefits of mobile agents and demonstrate the impact they have on the design of distributed systems before concluding this paper with a brief overview of some contemporary mobile agent systems.

This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However some five years after the word `agent' came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper -- but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.

The design of multi-agent systems is different from similar problems because the concept of agent involves the notions of autonomy and intelligence. As a consequence agentbased software engineering approaches must learn from classical design approaches but should go further introducing an explicit representation of the previous cited notions as well as of ontology, communications, mobility and other agents related issues.

In this paper, I will discuss the conceptual foundation of agent-oriented software development by relating the fundamental elements of the agent-oriented view to those of other, well established programming paradigms, especially the object-oriented approach. Furthermore, I will motivate the concept of autonomy as the basic property of the agent-oriented school and discuss the development history of programming paradigms that lead to this perspective on software systems. The paper will be concluded by an outlook on how the new paradigm can change the way we think about software systems.

This paper gives an overview of Ajanta, a Java-based system for mobile-agent programming. We outline the Ajanta architecture, and discuss the basic elements that comprise an agent-based application. Ajanta's programming environment is defined in terms of a set of primitive operations for agent creation, dispatch, migration and remote control. Agents can access server resources using a proxy-based access control mechanism. We describe a scheme for agent migration based on the composition of some basic migration patterns which incorporate exception handling mechanisms. Finally, we present two agent based distributed applications implemented using the Ajanta system. One is a middleware which supports file sharing over the Internet and the other is a distributed calendar manager.

Mobile agents can migrate among nodes to perform a set of management tasks at each of the visited nodes. Existing mobile agent-based network management systems often assume that their mobile agents are designed to work in particular networks to raise the efficiency of agent migration among multiple nodes.