Dave Robertson
Division of Informatics - University of Edinburgh
80 South Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1HN -United Kingdom
Fax: ++44 131 650 6516
dr@aisb.ed.ac.uk
http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/groups/ssp/members/dave.htm
Abstract
Engineers working on large, distributed, multi-agent systems face a problem which differs from conventional software engineering. They build software systems which must coexist with other systems about which little may be known, yet we wish the overall behaviour of the population of systems to be predictable in certain ways depending on the domain of application. There is a loose analogy to the biosciences, where the scientific response to the problem of understanding population behaviour has been to build mathematical models at various different levels of granularity of detail and use these to help form hypotheses about the driving forces in very complex ecological systems. We are beginning to follow a similar path in analysing multi-agent systems.
Two technical prerequisites for solving this problem are a framework within which to design and run experiments on models of large agent systems and clear software engineering methods which allow the results of experimental analyses to be related to agent design choices. These currently do not exist. There are numerous agent deployment systems but no convincing systems for modelling agent populations and their evolution. There are numerous software engineering methods but none of these translate easily to agent design. Providing a combination of analysis and design in this area must therefore be a ground-up exercise, drawing upon fragments of research from related areas. A group of us (Agusti, Anderson, Fourman, Parsons, Robertson, Sabater, Sannella, Sierra, Vasconcelos, Walton, Wooldridge) are attempting to do this. I shall report on the preliminary stages of our work.
Last Updated: May 17, 2000 by Elisabetta Ferrando