Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems II

1. Front Matter

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2. Requirements Engineering

   1. The Agent at the Center of the Requirements Engineering Process

      • Paolo Bresciani, Paolo Donzelli

      Pages 1-18

   2. Lexicon Based Ontology Construction

      • Karin Koogan Breitman, Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite

      Pages 19-34

   3. Multi-agent Systems and Security Requirements Analysis

      • Paolo Bresciani, Paolo Giorgini, Haralambos Mouratidis, Gordon Manson

      Pages 35-48

3. Software Architecture and Design

   1. Separation of Concerns in Multi-agent Systems: An Empirical Study

      • Alessandro Garcia, Cláudio Sant’Anna, Christina Chavez, Viviane Torres da Silva, Carlos J. P. de Lucena, Arndt von Staa

      Pages 49-72

   2. Architecting the Design of Multi-agent Organizations with Proto-frameworks

      • Andrés Díaz Pace, Marcelo Campo, Alvaro Soria

      Pages 73-91

   3. A Basic Taxonomy for Role Composition

      • Elke Steegmans, Kurt Schelfthout, Tom Holvoet, Yolande Berbers, Paul Valckenaers, Bart Saint Germain

      Pages 92-110

4. Modeling

   1. Object-Oriented Modeling Approaches to Agent-Based Workflow Services

      • M. Brian Blake, Hassan Gomaa

      Pages 111-128

   2. Using the MAS-ML to Model a Multi-agent System

      • Viviane Torres da Silva, Ricardo Choren, Carlos J. P. de Lucena

      Pages 129-148

   3. Software Engineering Challenges for Mutable Agent Systems

      • Ladislau Bölöni, Majid Ali Khan, Xin Bai, Guoqiang Wang, Yongchang Ji, Dan C. Marinescu

      Pages 149-166

5. Dependability

   1. Improving Exception Handling in Multi-agent Systems

      • Frédéric Souchon, Christophe Dony, Christelle Urtado, Sylvain Vauttier

      Pages 167-188

   2. On Manageability and Robustness of Open Multi-agent Systems

      • Naftaly H. Minsky, Takahiro Murata

      Pages 189-206

   3. Security Mechanisms for Mobile Agent Platforms Based on SPKI/SDSI Chains of Trust

      • Michelle S. Wangham, Joni da Silva Fraga, Rafael R. Obelheiro, Galeno A. Jung, Elizabeth Fernandes

      Pages 207-224

6. MAS Frameworks

   1. Farm: A Scalable Environment for Multi-agent Development and Evaluation

      • Bryan Horling, Roger Mailler, Victor Lesser

      Pages 225-242

   2. Role-Based Approaches for Engineering Interactions in Large-Scale Multi-agent Systems

      • Giacomo Cabri, Luca Ferrari, Franco Zambonelli

      Pages 243-263

   3. Evaluating Agent Architectures: Cougaar, Aglets and AAA

      • Ian Gorton, Jereme Haack, David McGee, Andrew Cowell, Olga Kuchar, Judi Thomson

      Pages 264-278

7. Back Matter

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Advances in networking technology have revitalized the investigation of agent technologyasapromisingparadigmforengineeringcomplexdistributedsoftware systems. Agent technology has been applied to a wide range of application - mains, including e-commerce, human-computer interfaces, telecommunications, and software assistants. Multi-agent systems (MASs) and their underlying t- ories provide a more natural support for ensuring important properties such as autonomy, mobility, environment heterogeneity, organization, openness, and intelligence. As a consequence, agent-based systems are likely to provide new - proaches to dealing with the complexity of developing and maintaining modern software. However, developing robust large-scale agent-based systems will - quire new software engineering approaches. There are currently many methods and techniques for working with individual agents or with systems built using only a few agents. Unfortunately, agent-based software engineering is still in its infancy and existing software engineering approaches are unable to cope with large MASs. The complexity associated with a large MAS is considerable. When a huge number of agents interact over heterogeneous environments, various phenomena occur which are not as easy to capture as when only a few agents are working together. As the multiple software agents are highly collaborative and operate in networked environments, they have to be context-aware and deal with - vironment uncertainty. This makes their coordination and management more di?cult and increases the likelihood of exceptional situations, such as security holes, privacy violations, and unexpected global e?ects. Moreover, as users and softwareengineersdelegatemoreautonomytotheirMASs,andputmoretrustin their results, new concernsarise in real-life applications.

• Requirements Engineering
• design
• modeling
• multi-agent system
• software architecture
• software engineering
• structured analysis

• Computer Science Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  Carlos Lucena

• Computer Science Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  Alessandro Garcia

• Computer Science School, Newcastle University, UK

  Alexander Romanovsky

• Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brasil

  Jaelson Castro

• School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

  Paulo S. C. Alencar

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