Agent-OrientedSoftwareEngineering.PDF

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Nicholas R. Jennings and Michael Wooldridge Department of Electronic Engineering Queen Mary Westfield College University of London London E1 4NS, United Kingdom {N.R.Jennings, M.J.Wooldridge}@qmw.ac.uk Abstract Agent-oriented techniques represent an exciting new means of analysing, designing and building com- plex software systems. They have the potential to significantly improve current practice in software engineering and to extend the range of applications that can feasibly be tackled. Yet, to date, there have been few serious attempts to cast agent systems as a software engineering paradigm. This paper seeks to rectify this omission. Specifically, it will be argued that: (i) the conceptual apparatus of agent-oriented systems is well-suited to building software solutions for complex systems and (ii) agent-oriented approaches represent a genuine advance over the current state of the art for engineering complex sys- tems. Following on from this view, the major issues raised by adopting an agent-oriented approach to software engineering are highlighted and discussed. 1. Introduction Designing and building high quality industrial-strength software is difficult. Indeed, it has been claimed that such development projects are among the most complex construction tasks under- taken by humans. Against this background, a wide range of software engineering paradigms have been devised (e.g., procedural programming, structured programming, declarative programming, object-oriented programming, design patterns, application frameworks