Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems V

Software is present in every aspect of our lives, pushing us inevitably towards a world of distributed computing systems. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of large-scale distributed systems. Multi-agent systems (MASs) and their underlying theories provide more natural support for ensuring important agent properties, such as autonomy, environmental heterogeneity, organization, and openness.

Nevertheless, a software agent is an inherently more complex abstraction, posing new challenges for software engineering. Without adequate development techniques and methods, MASs will not be sufficiently dependable, making their widespread adoption by industry more difficult.

The dependability of a computing system is its ability to deliver a service that can justifiably be trusted. This is a pivotal time for dependable distributed systems, as the traditional models used to express the relationships between a computational process and its environment are shifting from standard deterministic types towards ones that are more distributed and dynamic.

This served as a guiding principle when planning the Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems (SELMAS 2006) workshop, beginning with the selection of its theme: “Building Dependable Multi-Agent Systems.” It reflects our belief in the increasingly vital role that dependability plays as an essential element of MAS development.