Agents, Multiagent Systems and Software Engineering

In this chapter, I will outline the basic characteristics of intelligent agents and multiagent systems (MAS) and their relation to Software Engineering issues. I will start with an introduction to intelligent agents and then extend the single-agent case to systems with several intelligent agents. The basic concepts are still presented from a very general point-of-view and will be refined in subsequent chapters; the reader already familiar with MAS may safely skip this chapter and continue with chapter 3; a more thorough introduction to the field for the unfamiliar reader can be found in [Weiss, 1999]. After the general introduction, I will then briefly discuss some related research fields and finally provide a personal view on various topics of the relatively new research field of “agent-oriented software engineering” [Jennings et al., 1998].