All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu.This book was set in Times New Roman on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSterling, Leon. The art of agent-oriented modeling / Leon S. Sterling and Kuldar Taveter. p. cm. -(Intelligent robotics and autonomous agents series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01311-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Intelligent agents (Computer software) 2. Computer software-Development. I. Taveter, Kuldar. II. Title. QA76.76.I58S757 2009 006.3-dc22 2008044231 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1Int roductionWe live today in a complicated world. Complexity comes in many guises, and ranges from small-scale to large-scale concerns. On the small scale, we interact with an everincreasing array of devices, most of them new and incompletely understood, such as mobile phones and portable digital music players. On the large scale we live in complex institutions-governments, corporations, educational institutions, and religious groups. No one can understand all that goes on in such institutions. A sensible response to dealing e¤ectively with the complexity is to seek help. Help can come from other people. We may hire a consultant to help us deal with government. We may get a friend to help us install a home wireless network, or we may use software tools to automate tasks like updating clocks and software. It might even be sensible to combine both people and software. An underlying purpose of this book is to help us conceptualize a complicated environment, where many parts-both social and technical-interact. The key concepts we use are agents and systems.The underlying question in this book is how to design systems that work e¤ectively in the modern environment, where computing is pervasive, and where people interact with technology existing in a variety of networks and under a range of policies and constraints imposed by the institutions and social structures that we live in. We use the word ''system'' in the broadest sense. Systems encompass a combination of people and computers, hardware, and software. There are a range of devices, from phones to MP3 players, digital cameras, cars, and information booths.We are particularly interested in systems that contain a significant software component that may be largely invisible. Why the interest? Such systems have been hard to build, and a lot of expensive mistakes have been made. We believe that better conceptualization of systems will lead to better software.In this first chapter, we discuss our starting philosophy. There are particular challenges within the modern networked, computing environment, such as its changeability and consequent uncertainty. We disc...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) technology is widely used for the development of intelligent distributed systems that manage sensitive data (e.g., ambient assisted living, healthcare, energy trading). To foster accountability and trusted interactions, recent trends advocate the use of blockchain technologies (BCT) for MAS. Although most of these approaches have only started exploring the topic, there is an impending need for establishing a research road-map, as well as identifying scientific and technological challenges in this scope. As a first necessary step towards this goal, this paper presents a systematic literature review of studies involving MAS and BCT as reconciling solutions. Aiming at providing a comprehensive overview of their application domains, we analyze motivations, assumptions, requirements, strengths, and limitations presented in the current state of the art. Moreover, discussing the future challenges, we introduce our vision on how MAS and BCT could be combined in different application scenarios.technical and scientific challenges. Despite many attempts and previous works aiming at developing models and mechanisms to guarantee communications security and trust in MAS [4,5,6], such requirements have not been fully satisfied yet.Recent trends [7,8,9,10] nourish the promising idea of integrating MAS and blockchain technologies (BCT) [11,12], with the expectation of providing BCT features in use-cases where agent systems require them. However, employing a new technology such as blockchain "as-is" and by itself in dynamic and quickly evolving scenarios can represent an unlucky choice. This may be due to several reasons, spanning from fundamental properties of BCT, to application/domain specific constraints. As an example, consider the modification of blockchain code, which can happen through majority consensus. Reaching consensus in a distributed multi-stakeholder network with possible unaligned interests can be considerably complex, and new issues might be introduced as a result [13]. Although effective, some strategic decisions can hinder the evolution of the technology from academic institutions to real-world problems [14].Nevertheless, combining BCT and MAS can represent a win-win solution if properly managed: On the one hand, the adoption and adaption of BCT may fix the security limitations broadly known in MAS literature. On the other hand, BCT can also contribute with features missing in some MAS scenarios (e.g., flexibility). For example, cloud computing systems dealing with potentially "very large datasets" are going towards a process of agentification, exploiting the crucial support of blockchain technology [8]. Considering agents as atomic entities populating P2P communities, the design of a fair scheduling and a general protection of the whole cluster against abusive or malfunctioning nodes is currently one of the main challenges [15]. In particular, in distributed master-less systems with reputation rating across the cluster, the application of multi-level principles of cryptocurrencies has...

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In this paper, we describe research results arising from a technology transfer exercise on agent-oriented requirements engineering with an industry partner. We introduce two improvements to the state-of-the-art in agent-oriented requirements engineering, designed to mitigate two problems experienced by ourselves and our industry partner: (1) the lack of systematic methods for agent-oriented requirements elicitation and modelling; and (2) the lack of prescribed deliverables in agent-oriented requirements engineering. We discuss the application of our new approach to an aircraft turnaround simulator built in conjunction with our industry partner, and show how agent-oriented models can be derived and used to construct a complete requirements package. We evaluate this by having three independent people design and implement prototypes of the aircraft turnaround simulator, and comparing the three prototypes. Our evaluation indicates that our approach is effective at delivering correct, complete, and consistent requirements that satisfy the stakeholders, and can be used in a repeatable manner to produce designs and implementations. We discuss lessons learnt from applying this approach.

Meaningfully automating sociotechnical business collaboration promises efficiency-, effectiveness-, and quality increases for realizing next-generation decentralized autonomous organizations. For automating business-process aware cross-organizational operations, the development of existing choreography languages is technology driven and focuses less on sociotechnical suitability and expressiveness concepts and properties that recognize the interaction between people in organizations and technology in workplaces. This gap our suitability-and expressiveness exploration fills by means of a cross-organizational collaboration ontology that we map as a proof-of-concept evaluation to the eSourcing Markup Language (eSML). The latter we test in a feasibility case study to meaningfully support the automation of business collaboration. The developed eSourcing ontology and eSML is replicable for exploring strengths and weaknesses of other choreography languages.