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Multiagent systems as software architecture: another perspective on software engineering with multiagent systems

Published: 08 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The trend in agent-oriented software engineering is to consider multiagent systems (MASs) as a radically new way of engineering software. This position isolates agent-oriented software engineering from mainstream software engineering and could be one important reason why MASs are not widely adopted in industry yet.In this paper, we present another perspective on software engineering with MASs. We put forward MASs as software architecture. We give an overview of a reference architecture for situated MAS. This reference architecture extracts and generalizes common functions and structures from various applications we have studied and built. The reference architecture provides a blueprint for architectural design of MAS applications that share the come base of the systems it is derived from. Considering MASs essentially as software architecture paves the way to integration with mainstream software engineering.

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Cited By

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  • (2007)Architecture-Centric Software Development of Situated Multiagent SystemsEngineering Societies in the Agents World VII10.1007/978-3-540-75524-1_4(62-85)Online publication date: 2007
  • (2007)A Reference Architecture for Situated Multiagent SystemsEnvironments for Multi-Agent Systems III10.1007/978-3-540-71103-2_1(1-40)Online publication date: 2007

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cover image ACM Conferences
AAMAS '06: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
May 2006
1631 pages
ISBN:1595933034
DOI:10.1145/1160633
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 May 2006

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Cited By

View all
  • (2007)Architecture-Centric Software Development of Situated Multiagent SystemsEngineering Societies in the Agents World VII10.1007/978-3-540-75524-1_4(62-85)Online publication date: 2007
  • (2007)A Reference Architecture for Situated Multiagent SystemsEnvironments for Multi-Agent Systems III10.1007/978-3-540-71103-2_1(1-40)Online publication date: 2007

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