Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems

Franco Zambonelli is professor in Computer Science at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia since 2001. He obtained the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering in 1992, and the PhD in Computer Science in 1997, both from the University of Bologna. His current research interests include: distributed and pervasive computing, agent-oriented software engineering, self-organization in distributed systems engineering. In these areas, he has published over 120 papers in international fora, co-edited 7 books, received several best paper awards, and has been invited speaker and tutorialist in several international conferences and workshops. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, AIIA, and TABOO.

As information technologies become increasingly distributed and accessible to larger number of people and as commercial and government organizations are challenged to scale their applications and services to larger market shares, while reducing costs, there is demand for software methodologies and appli- tions to provide the following features: Richer application end-to-end functionality; Reduction of human involvement in the design and deployment of the software; Flexibility of software behaviour; and Reuse and composition of existing software applications and systems in novel or adaptive ways. When designing new distributed software systems, the above broad requi- ments and their translation into implementations are typically addressed by partial complementarities and overlapping technologies and this situation gives rise to significant software engineering challenges. Some of the challenges that may arise are: determining the components that the distributed applications should contain, organizing the application components, and determining the assumptions that one needs to make in order to implement distributed scalable and flexible applications, etc.

Is an excellent reference for anyone in developing multi-agent systems

Concepts and Abstractions of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.- Agent-Based Abstractions for Software Development.- On the Use of Agents as Components of Software Systems.- A Survey on Agent-Oriented Oriented Software Engineering Research.- Methodologies for Agent-Based Systems Development.- The Gaia Methodology.- The Tropos Methodology.- The MaSE Methodology.- A Comparative Evaluation of Agent-Oriented Methodologies.- Special-Purpose Methodologies.- The ADELFE Methodology.- The Message Methodology.- The SADDE Methodology.- The Prometheus Methodology.- Tools and Infrastructures for Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.- The AUML Approach.- FIPA-Compliant Agent Infrastructures.- Coordination Infrastructures in the Engineering of Multiagent Systems.- Non Traditional Approaches to Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.- Engineering Amorphous Computing Systems.- Making Self-Organising Adaptive Multiagent Systems Work.- Engineering Swarming Systems.- Online Engineering and Open Computational Systems.- Emerging Trends and Perspectives.- Agents for Ubiquitous Computing.- Agents and the Grid.- Roadmap of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.