Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems

In the last few years, information system technologies have focused on solving challenges in order to develop distributed applications. Distributed systems can be viewed as collections of service-provider and service-consumer components interlinked by dynamically defined workflows (Luck and McBurney 2008). Nowadays, there has been a trend inmodeling software as a service in order to provide higher levels of functionality that facilitate the emergence of new services dynamically. These models demand complex, flexible, and adaptive systems, in which components cannot simply be passive and reactive entities managed by only one organization (Del Val et al. 2014). Instead of being a solitary activity, computation becomes an inherently social one, leading to new ways of conceiving, designing, developing, and handling computational systems (Sierra et al. 2011). Considering the emergence of distributed paradigms such as web services, serviceoriented computing, grid computing, peer-to-peer technologies, autonomic computing, etc., large systems can be viewed as the services that are offered and consumed by different entities. The concept of an intelligent agent provides support to build distributed systems as components with higher levels of intelligence, which demand complex ways of interaction and cooperation in order to solve specific objectives. Therefore, wide agreement can be found in the literature regarding the relevance of multiagent systems as a proper paradigm for building current and next generation distributed systems. Multiagent systems are one of the most important and exciting research areas that have arisen in the field of Information Technologies in the last decade (Luck et al. 2005). According to Wooldridge and Jennings (1995), an agent is defined by its flexibility, which implies that an agent is: reactive, an agent must answer to its environment; proactive, an agent has to be able to try to fulfill his own plans or objectives; and social, an agent has to be able to communicate with other agents by means of some kind of language. A multiagent system consists of a number of agents that interact with one another (Wooldridge 2002). The area of multiagent systems represents a key development issue, especially in distributed artificial intelligence. In open and dynamic systems, agents may enter or abandon the system for different reasons; agents act on behalf of service owners, managing access to services, and ensuring that contracts are fulfilled; agents act on behalf of service consumers, locating services, making contracts, and receiving and presenting results; agents are required to engage in interactions, negotiate with one another, make agreements, and make proactive run-time decisions, individually and collectively, while responding to changing circumstances; agents also need to collaborate within organizations and to form coalitions of agents with different capabilities in support of virtual organizations to reach global and individual goals. When developing applications based on the new generation of distributed systems, developers and users require infrastructures and tools that support essential features in multiagent systems (such as agent organizations, mobility, etc.) and that facilitate system design, management, execution, and J. M. Alberola (*) :V. Botti Departament de Sistemes Informatics i Computacio, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain e-mail: jalberola@dsic.upv.es