| Agent technology, in particular multi-agent systems, is beginning to play
an important role in today's software development at industrial level. Until
recently, the main focus of the multi-agent systems community has been
on the development of concepts, architectures, interaction techniques, and
general approaches to the analysis and specification of multi-agent systems.
However, these contributions, which are sometimes formal but often informal,
have been quite fragmented, without any clear way of "putting it all
together", and thus completely inaccessible to practitioners. Clearly, the success
of agent-oriented system design and implementation can only be guaranteed
if we can bridge the gap between analysis and implementation, and thus
develop expressive programming languages and well-developed platforms so
that the concepts and techniques of multi-agent systems can be easily and
directly implemented.
In this book we have invited several research groups to report on their
work on programming languages and platforms, or large-scale multi-agent
systems applications. Most importantly, we have explicitly asked them to
follow a particular chapter structure, according to templates we provided.
More than that, we asked them to answer several key questions providing a
summary of the main features of each framework (these can be found in the
appendices of this book). |
