Agent-Oriented Software Engineering IV

The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, enterprise resource planning, and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software must be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on different platforms, without recompilation and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and users. Furthermore, software must be robust and autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with minimal overhead and interference.

Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of software systems. They offer higher-level abstractions and mechanisms that address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which require conceptual modeling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, such as inference-based query answering, transaction control, adaptive workflows, brokering and integration of disparate information sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities enable more faithful and flexible treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more effective requirements analysis and architectural and detailed design.