Programming Multi-Agent Systems

Press Room

• Multiagentensysteme werden zu Katastrophenhelfern
  Bericht von Gerd Martin in der Computer Zeitung Online am 6.10.2008
• Wie bei einer Katastrophe künstliche Agenten zusammenarbeiten
  Press Release 12.08.2008 (German only)

Summary

Intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) play an important role in today's software development. In fact, they constitute a new and interesting paradigm to implement complex systems, by oering relevant abstractions for the engineering of such intricate type of software. Several application domains, some at industrial level, take benet from MAS technology. For almost two decades, the MAS community has developed and oers a large and rich set of concepts, architectures, interaction techniques, and general approaches to the analysis and the specication of MAS.

One of the main challenges of the MAS community in recent years has been to combine the existing practical tools and theoretical approaches in order to providepractitioners with mature programming languages and platforms that help them to design, implement, and deploy efficiently a new generation of complex software built as MAS. The organisers of this seminar, and also the participants, share the conviction that the success of agent-based systems can only be guaranteed if expressive programming languages and well-developed platforms are available, so that the concepts and techniques of multi-agent systems can be easily and directly used in practice

The aim of this seminar was to bring together researchers from both academia and industry for bridging this gap and identifying interesting lines of research within multi-agent systems. In this respect, the seminar topic is also very relevant for industrial research and development.

The seminar concluded with very positive results, both in regards to the scientific content as well as a networking opportunity. Meanwhile, we have secured a special issue of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems for the best papers based on talks given by the participants of this Dagstuhl seminar. An internal call for papers has been issued and we aim for publication in the second half of 2009.

In summary, it is our impression that the participants enjoyed the great scientific atmosphere offered by Schloss Dagstuhl, and the technical programme of the seminar. We are grateful for having had the opportunity to organise this fruitful seminar, specially because it was another Dagstuhl seminar which helped us, six years ago, to start an outstanding international cooperation in the domain of Multi-Agent Programming (see references). Special thanks are due to the whole Dagstuhl staff for their assistance in the organisation and the running of the seminar.