Multi-Agent Systems

Intelligent agent technology is at an intriguing stage in its development. Commercial strength agent applications are increasingly being developed in domains as diverse as manufacturing (Deen, 2003; Bussman et al., 2004; Jarvis et al., 2008a) war gaming (Jones et al., 1999; Heinze et al., 2002) and UAV mission management (Karim and Heinze, 2005). Furthermore industrial strength development environments are available, e.g. (AOS Group, 2012; University of Michigan, 2012; JADE, 2012) and design methodologies (Padgham and Winikoff, 2004) reference architectures (van Brussel et al., 1998) and standards (IEEE Computer Society, 2012) are beginning to appear.