Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A Manifesto for Agent Technology: Towards Next Generation Computing

  • Published:
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The European Commission's eEurope initiative aims to bring every citizen, home, school, business and administration online to create a digitally literate Europe. The value lies not in the objective itself, but in its ability to facilitate the advance of Europe into new ways of living and working. Just as in the first literacy revolution, our lives will change in ways never imagined. The vision of eEurope is underpinned by a technological infrastructure that is now taken for granted. Yet it provides us with the ability to pioneer radical new ways of doing business, of undertaking science, and, of managing our everyday activities. Key to this step change is the development of appropriate mechanisms to automate and improve existing tasks, to anticipate desired actions on our behalf (as human users) and to undertake them, while at the same time enabling us to stay involved and retain as much control as required. For many, these mechanisms are now being realised by agent technologies, which are already providing dramatic and sustained benefits in several business and industry domains, including B2B exchanges, supply chain management, car manufacturing, and so on. While there are many real successes of agent technologies to report, there is still much to be done in research and development for the full benefits to be achieved. This is especially true in the context of environments of pervasive computing devices that are envisaged in coming years. This paper describes the current state-of-the-art of agent technologies and identifies trends and challenges that will need to be addressed over the next 10 years to progress the field and realise the benefits. It offers a roadmap that is the result of discussions among participants from over 150 organisations including universities, research institutions, large multinational corporations and smaller IT start-up companies. The roadmap identifies successes and challenges, and points to future possibilities and demands; agent technologies are fundamental to the realisation of next generation computing.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. S. Abramsky, ''Semantics of interaction: An introduction to game semantics,'' in A. M. Pitts and P. Dybjer, (eds.), Semantics and Logics of Computation, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1997, pp. 1-31.

    Google Scholar 

  2. E. Alonso, M. D'Inverno, D. Kudenko, M. Luck, and J. Noble, ''Learning in Multi-Agent Systems,'' The Knowl. Eng. Rev., vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 277-284, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  3. L. Amgoud, N. Maudet, and S. Parsons, ''Modelling dialogues using argumentation,'' in E. Durfee (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS 2000), IEEE Press: Boston, MA, USA, 2000a, pp. 31-38.

    Google Scholar 

  4. L. Amgoud, S. Parsons, and N. Maudet, ''Arguments, dialogue, and negotiation,'' in W. Horn (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2000), IOS Press: Berlin, Germany, 2000b, pp. 338-342.

    Google Scholar 

  5. A. Ankolenkar, M. Burstein, J. R. Hobbs, O. Lassila, D. L. Martin, S. A. M. Drew McDermott, S. Narayanan, M. Paolucci, T. R. Payne, and K. Sycara, 2001, ''DAML-S: Web Service Description for the Semantic Web,'' in I. F. Cruz, S. Decker, J. Euzenat, and D. L. McGuinness, (eds.), The First Semantic Web Working Symposium, Stanford University: California, 2001, pp. 411-430.

  6. Aristotle, Topics, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1928.

    Google Scholar 

  7. K. Arnold, B. O'Sullivan, R. W. Scheifler, J. Waldo, and A. Wollrath, The Jini Specification, Addison-Wesley, 1999.

  8. R. Ashri, M. Luck, and M. d'Inverno, ''Infrastructure support for agent-based development,'' in M. d'Inverno, M. Luck, M. Fisher, and C. Preist, (eds.), Foundations and Applications ofMulti-Agent Systems, vol. 2403 of LNAI, 2002, pp. 73-88.

  9. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 1962.

  10. R. Aylett and M. Luck, 2000, ''Applying artificial intelligence to virtual reality: Intelligent virtual environments,'' Appl. Artif. Intell., vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 3-32, 1962.

    Google Scholar 

  11. C. L. Barrett and C. M. Reidys, ''Elements of a theory of computer simulation I: Sequential CA over random graphs,'' Appl. Mathe. Comput., vol. 98, pp. 241-259, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  12. J. Baumann, H. K. Rothermel, M. Strasser, and W. Theilmann, ''MOLE. A mobile agent system,'' Software-Prac. Exp., vol. 32, no. 6, 575-603, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  13. J. Baxter and R. Hepplewhite, 1999, ''Agents in tank battle simulations,'' Commun. ACM., vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 74-75.

    Google Scholar 

  14. A. L. C. Bazzan, J. Wahle, and F. Klügl, ''Agents in traffic modelling: From reactive to social behaviour,'' in Proceedings of the 23rd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, 1999, pp. 303-306.

  15. N. Boccara, Modeling Complex Systems, Graduate Texts in Contemporary Physics, Springer: New York, NY, USA, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  16. M. E. Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  17. R. Brooks, ''Intelligence without Representation,'' Artif. Intell., vol. 47, no. 1-3, pp. 139-159, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  18. K. Bryson, M. Luck, M. Joy, and D. Jones, ''Agent interaction for bioinformatics data management,'' Appl. Artif. Intell., vol. 15, no. 10, pp. 917-947, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  19. N. Chaib-draa and F. Dignum, ''Trends in agent communication language,'' Comput. Intell., vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 89-101, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  20. A. Chavez and P. Maes, ''Kasbah: An agent marketplace for buying and selling goods,'' in First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM'96). Practical Application Company: London, UK, 1996, pp. 75-90.

    Google Scholar 

  21. P. Ciancarini, R. Tolksdorf, and F. Zambonelli, ''A survey of coordination-middleware for XML-centric applications,'' The Knowl. Eng. Rev., vol. 17, no. 4, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  22. W. R. Cockayne, and M. Zyda, Mobile Agents, Manning Publications, 1997.

  23. D. Cockburn and N. R. Jennings, ''ARCHON: A Distributed Artificial Intelligence System for Industrial Applications,'' in G. M. P. O'Hare and N. R. Jennings, (eds.), Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence. John Wiley & Sons, 1996. pp. 319-344.

  24. P. R. Cohen, and C. R. Perrault, ''Elements of a plan based theory of speech Acts,'' Cogn. Sci. vol. 3, pp. 177-212, 1979.

    Google Scholar 

  25. R. Conte and C. Dellarocas,Social Order in Multiagent Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.

  26. J. Dale and E. Mamdani, ''Open standards for interoperating agent-based systems,'' Software Focus, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001.

  27. R. K. Dash, D. C. Parkes, and N. R. Jennings, ''Computational mechanism design: A call to arms,'' IEEE Intell. Syst., vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 40-47, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  28. P. Davidsson, ''Multi agent based simulation: Beyond social simulation,'' in S. Moss and P. Davidsson, (eds.), Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, vol. 1979 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, pp. 97-107, 2001.

  29. P. Davidsson and M. Boman, ''Saving energy and providing value added services in intelligent buildings: A MAS approach,'' in D. Kotz and F. Mattern, (eds.), Agent Systems, Mobile Agents, and Applications, vol. 1882 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, pp. 166-177, 2002.

  30. R. Davis and R. G. Smith, ''Negotiation as a metaphor for distributed problem solving,'' Artif. Intell., vol. 20, no. 1, 1983.

  31. K. Decker and V. Lesser 'Designing a family of coordination algorithms,' in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 73-80, 1995.

  32. K. Decker, K. Sycara, and M. Williamson, ''Middle-agents for the internet,'' in Proceedings of the 15th Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997, pp. 578-573.

  33. K. Decker, X. Zheng, and C. Schmidt, ''A multi-agent system for automated genetic annotation,'' in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, 2000, pp. 433-440.

  34. M. E. desJardins, E. H. Durfee, and C. L. O. nad Michael J. Wolverton, ''A survey of research in distributed, continual planning,'' AI Magazine, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 13-22, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  35. F. Dignum, B. Dunin-Keplicz, and R. Verbrugge, ''Agent theory for team formation by dialogue,'' in C. Castelfranchi and Y. Lespérance, (eds.), Intelligent Agents VII: Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL 2000), Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2000, pp. 150-166.

    Google Scholar 

  36. F. Dignum, B. Dunin-Keplicz, and R. Verbrugge, ''Creating collective intention through dialogue,'' Logic IGPL, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 305-319, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  37. M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, and M. Luck, 1998, ''Interaction protocols in agentis,'' in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, IEEE Press, 1998, pp. 261-268.

  38. M. d'Inverno, and M. Luck, ''Understanding autonomous interaction,'' in W. Wahlster (ed.), ECAI'96-Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 1996, pp. 529-533.

  39. M. d'Inverno and M. Luck, Understanding Agent Systems. Springer, (2nd edn.), 2004.

  40. M. d'Inverno, M. Luck, M. Georgeff, D. Kinny, and M. Wooldridge, ''The dMARS architecture: A specification of the distributed multi-agent reasoning system,'' Auton. Agents Multi-Agent Syst., 2004.

  41. R. Duboz, èric Ramat, and P. Preux, ''Scale transfer modeling: using emergent computation for coupling an ordinary differential equation system with a reactive agent model,'' Syst. Anal. Model. Simul. vol. 43, no. 6, pp. 793-814, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  42. K. Ducatel, M. Bogdanowicz, F. Scapolo, J. Leijten, and J.-C. Burgelman, ''Scenarios for ambient intelligence in 2010,'' Technical report, Information Society Technologies, European Commission, 2001.

  43. E. H. Durfee and V. R. Lesser, ''Partial global planning: A coordination framework for distributed hypothesis formation,'' IEEE Trans. Syst. Man, Cyber, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 1167-1183, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  44. F. Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, F. S. Henkemans, J. A. Blair, R. H. Johnson, E. C. W. Krabbe, C. Plantin, D. N. Walton, C. A. Willard, J. Woods, and D. Zarefsky, Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ, USA, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  45. U. Endriss and N. Maudet, ''Welfare engineering in multiagent systems,'' in A. Omicini, P. Petta, and J. Pitt, (eds.), Engineering Societies in the Agents World (ESAW-2003): Post-Proceedings.Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  46. U. Endriss, N. Maudet, F. Sadri, and F. Toni, ''On optimal outcomes of negotiations over resources,'' in M. W. J. S. Rosenschein, T. Sandholm and M. Yokoo, (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2002), ACM Press: New York, NY, USA, 2003, pp. 177-184.

    Google Scholar 

  47. M. Esteva, J. A. Rodrøguez-Aguilar, C. Sierra, P. Garcia, and J. L. Arcos, ''On the formal speci-fications of electronic institutions,'' in Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce, The European Agent-Link Perspective, Berlin, Springer-Verlag: 2001, pp. 126-147.

    Google Scholar 

  48. R. Fagin, J. Y. Halpern, Y. Moses, and M. Y. Vardi, Reasoning about Knowledge, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  49. T. Finin, Y. Labrou, and J. Mayfield, ''KQML as an agent communication language,'' in J. Bradshaw (ed.), Software Agents, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1997, pp. 291-316.

    Google Scholar 

  50. FIPA, ''Communicative act library specification,'' Standard SC00037J, Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, 2002.

  51. I. Foster, and C. Kesselman, (eds.), The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.

  52. I. Foster, C. Kesselman, and S.Tuecke, ''The anatomy of the grid: Enabling scalable virtual organizations,'' Int. J. High Perform. Compu. Appl. vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 200-222, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  53. J. G. Frey, M. Bradley, J. W. Essex, M. B. Hursthouse, S. M. Lewis, M. M. Luck, L. Moreau, D. C. D. Roure, M. Surridge, and A. Welsh, ''Combinatorial chemistry and the Grid,'' in F. Berman, G. Fox, and T. Hey, (eds.), Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. John Wiley and Sons: Chichester, England, 2003, pp. 945-962.

    Google Scholar 

  54. D. Gambetta, (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, Blackwell: Basil, 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  55. E. Goubault, ''Geometry and concurrency: a user's guide,'' Math. Struct. Comput. Sci., vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 411-425, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  56. S. Grand, D. Cliff, and A. Malhotra, ''Creatures: Artificial life autonomous software agents for home entertainment,'' in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, ACM Press, 1997, pp. 22-29.

  57. R. S. Gray, G. Cybenko, D. Kotz, R. A. Peterson, and D. Rus, ''D'Agents: Applications and performance of a mobile-agent system,''Software-Prac. Exp., vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 543-573, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  58. N. Griffiths, and M. Luck, ''Coalition formation through motivation and trust,'' in Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. ACM Press: 2003, pp. 17-24.

  59. J. Hendler, ''Agents and the Semantic Web,'' IEEE Intell. Syst., vol. 16, no. 2.

  60. R. Hill, J. Chen, J. Gratch, P. Rosenbloom, and M. Tambe, ''Intelligent agents for the synthetic battlefield,'' in Joint proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Ninth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Providence, RI, 1997, pp. 1006-1012.

  61. I. Horrocks, ''DAML+OIL: A Reason-able Web ontology language,'' in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Extending Database Technology. Springer-Verlag, 2002, pp. 2-13.

  62. I. Horrocks, P. F. Patel-Schneider, and F. van Harmelen, ''From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The making of a web ontology language,'' J. of Web Semantics, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7-26, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  63. N. Howden, R. Ronnquist, A. Hodgson, and A. Lucas, ''JACK Intelligent Agents: Summary of an agent infrastructure,'' in T. Wagner and O. Rana (eds.), The 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Workshop on Infrastructure for Agents, MAS and Scalable MAS, 2001, pp. 251-257.

  64. M. N. Huhns, L. M. Stephens, and N. Ivezic, ''Automating supply-chain management,'' in Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, ACM Press: 2002, pp. 1017-1024.

  65. N. R. Jennings, ''An agent-based approach for building complex software systems,'' Communi. ACM, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 35-41, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  66. N. Jennings, P. Faratin, A. Lomuscio, S. Parsons, C. Sierra, and M. Wooldridge, ''Automated negotiation: Prospects, methods and challenges,'' Group Decis. Negot. vol. 10, no. 2, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  67. F. V. Jensen, Introduction to Bayesian Networks, Springer: New York, NY, USA, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  68. D. Johansen, K. J. Lauvset, R. van Renesse, F. B. Schneider, N. P. Sudmann, and K. Jacobsen, ''A TACOMA retrospective,'' Software-Prac. Exp., vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 605-619, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  69. S. Khan, R. Makkena, F. McGeary, K. Decker, W. Gillis, and C. Schmidt, ''A multi-agent system for the quantitative simulation of biological networks,'' in Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. ACM Press, 2003, pp. 385-392.

  70. M. Klusch, ''Information agent technology for the internet: A survey,'' Data Knowl. Eng., vol. 36, no. 3, 2001.

  71. M. Klusch and K. Sycara, ''Brokering and matchmaking for coordination of agent societies: A Survey,'' in A. Omicini, F. Zambonelli, M. Klusch, and R. Tolksdorf, (eds.), Coordination of Internet Agents: Models, Technologies, and Applications, Springer:Verlag, 2001, pp. 197-224.

  72. Y. Labrou, T. Finin, and Y. Peng, ''The current landscape of Agent Communication Languages,'' IEEE Intell. Syst., vol. 14, no. 2, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  73. D. B. Lange and M. Oshima, Programming and Deploying Java Mobile Agents Aglets, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co. Inc, 1998.

  74. G. L. Lilien, P. Kotler, and K. S. Moorthy, Marketing Models, Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  75. F. Lopez y Lopez, M. Luck, and M. d'Inverno, ''Constraining autonomy through Norms,'' in Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, ACM Press, 2002, pp. 674-681.

  76. C. K. Low, T. Y. Chen, and R. Roennquist, ''Automated test case generation for BDI agents,'' Auton. Agents Multi-Agent Syst., vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 311-332, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  77. M. Luck, ''From definition to deployment: What next for agent-based systems?,'' Knowl. Eng. Rev., vol. 14, no. 2, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  78. M. Luck, R. Ashri, and M. d'Inverno, Agent-Based Software Development, Artech House: Norwood, MA, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  79. M. Luck and M. d'Inverno, ''A formal framework for agency and autonomy,'' in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, AAAI Press/MIT Press, 1995, pp. 254-260.

  80. M. Luck, S. Munroe, and M. d'Inverno, ''Autonomy: Variable and generative,'' in H. Hexmoor, C. Castelfranchi, and R. Falcone, (eds.), Agent Autonomy, Kluwer, 2003, pp. 9-22.

  81. P. M. Markopoulos, and J. O. Kephart, ''How valuable are shopbots?,'' in Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. ACM Press, 2002, pp. 1009-1016.

  82. P. McBurney, R. Eijk, S. Parsons, and L. Amgoud, ''A dialogue-game protocol for agent purchase negotiations,'' J. Auton. Agents Multi-Agent Syst., vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 235-273, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  83. P. McBurney and S. Parsons, ''Formalizing scenario analysis,'' in A. Darwiche and N. Friedman, (eds.), Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference (UAI-2002), Morgan Kaufmann: San Francisco, CA, USA, 2002, pp. 327-334.

    Google Scholar 

  84. P. McBurney and S. Parsons, ''Dialogue game protocols,'' in M.-P. Huget (ed.), Communication in Multi-Agent Systems: Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2650. Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2003, pp. 269-283.

    Google Scholar 

  85. P. McBurney and S. Parsons, ''Engineering democracy in open agent systems,'' in A. Omicini, P. Petta, and J. Pitt, (eds.), Engineering Societies in the Agents World (ESAW-2003): Post-Proceedings, Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  86. P. McNamara and H. Prakken, (eds.), Norms, Logics and Information Systems: New Studies in Deontic Logic and Computer Science, IOS Press: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  87. L. Moreau, S. Miles, C. Goble, M. Greenwood, V. Dialani, M. Addis, N. Alpdemir, R. Cawley, D. D. Roure, J. Ferris, R. Gaizauskas, K. Glover, C. Greenhalgh, P. Li, X. Liu, P. Lord, M. Luck, D. Marvin, T. Oinn, N. Paton, S. Pettifer, M. V. Radenkovic, A. Roberts, A. Robinson, T. Rodden, M. Senger, N. Sharman, R. Stevens, B. Warboys, A. Wipat, and C. Wroe, ''On the use of agents in a bioInformatics grid,'' in S. Lee, S. Sekguchi, S. Matsuoka, and M. Sato, (eds.), in Proceedings of the Third IEEE/ACM CCGRID'2003 Workshop on Agent Based Cluster and Grid Computing. Tokyo, Japan, 2003, pp. 653-661.

  88. J. Nicolaisen, V. Petrov, and L. Tesfatsion, ''Market power and efficiency in a computational electricity market with discriminatory double-auction pricing,'' IEEE Trans. on Evol. Comput., vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 504-523, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  89. T. J. Norman, A. Preece, S. Chalmers, N. R. Jennings, M. M. Luck, V. D. Dang, T. D. Nguyen, V. Deora, J. Shao, W. A. Gray, and N. J. Fiddian, ''CONOISE: Agent-based formation of virtual organisations,'' in Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XX: Proceedings of AI2003, the Twenty third International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2003, pp. 353-366.

  90. S. Oaks, B. Traversat, and L. Gong, JXTA In a Nutshell. O'Reilly and Associates, 2002.

  91. J. Odell, H. Van Dyke Parunak, and B. Bauer, ''Representing agent interaction protocols in UML,'' in P. Ciancarini and M. J. Wooldridge, (eds.), First International Workshop, AOSE 2000 on Agentoriented Software Engineering, Springer-Verlag, 2001, pp. 121-140.

  92. M. J. Osborne, and A. Rubinstein, A Course in Game Theory, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  93. M. Paolucci, T. Kawamura, T. R. Payne, and K. P. Sycara, ''Semantic matchmaking of web services capabilities,'' in I. Horrocks and J. A. Hendler, (eds.), International Semantic Web Conference, vol. 2342 of LNCS, Springer, 2002, pp. 333-347.

  94. R. Parikh, ''The logic of games and its applications,'' Ann. Discrete Math., vol. 24, pp. 111-140, 1985.

    Google Scholar 

  95. S. Parsons, and P. McBurney, ''Argumentation-based communication between agents,'' in M.-P. Huget (ed.), Communication in Multi-Agent Systems: Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2650, Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2003, pp. 164-178.

    Google Scholar 

  96. H. V. D. Parunak, ''A practitioners review of industrial agent applications,'' Auton. Agents Multi-Agent Syst., vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 389-407, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  97. M. Pauly, ''Logic for social software,'' Ph.D. thesis, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Universiteit van Amsterdam: Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation Dissertation Series DS-2001-10), 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  98. T. R. Payne, R. Singh, and K. P. Sycara, ''Importing the semantic web in UDDI,'' in C. Bussler, R. Hull, S. A. McIlraith, M. E. Orlowska, B. Pernici, and J. Yang, (eds.), Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web, CAiSE 2002 International Workshop, vol. 2512 of LNCS, Springer, 2002, pp. 225-236.

  99. S. Phelps, P. McBurney, S. Parsons, and E. Sklar, ''Co-evolutionary auction mechanism design: A preliminary report,'' in J. Padget, D. C. Parkes, N. M. Sadeh, O. Shehory, and W. E. Walsh, (eds.), Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce IV: Designing Mechanisms and Systems, Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2003, pp. 123-142.

    Google Scholar 

  100. J. L. Pollock, Cognitive Carpentry: A Blueprint for How to Build a Person, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  101. C. Preist, C. Bartolini, and A. Byde, ''Agent-based service composition through simultaneous negotiation in forward and reverse auctions,'' in Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. ACM Press, 2003, pp. 55-63.

  102. I. Rahwan, P. McBurney, and E. Sonenberg, ''Towards a theory of negotiation strategy (a preliminary report),'' in S. Parsons and P. Gmytrasiewicz, (eds.), Fifth Workshop on Decision-Theoretic and Game-Theoretic Agents, AAMAS: Melbourne, Australia, 2003, pp. 73-80.

    Google Scholar 

  103. I. Rahwan, S. D. Ramchurn, N. R. Jennings, P. McBurney, S. Parsons, and E. Sonenberg, ''Argumentation-based negotiation,'' Knowl. Eng. Rev. (In press), 2004.

  104. A. S. Rao and M. P. Georgeff, ''Modeling rational agents within a BDI-Architecture,'' in J. Allen, R. Fikes, and E. Sandewall, (eds.) Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning KR91, Morgan Kaufmann: San Mateo, CA, USA, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  105. S. Renooij, ''Probability elicitation for belief networks: issues to consider,'' Knowl. Eng. Rev., vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 255-269, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  106. J. Rickel and W. L. Johnson, ''Integrating pedagogical capabilities in a virtual environment agent,'' in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, ACM Press, 1997, pp. 30-38.

  107. A. E. Roth, ''The economist as engineer: game theory, experimentation, and computation as tools for design economics,'' Econometrica, vol. 70, no. 4, pp. 1341-1378, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  108. J. Sabater, and C. Sierra, ''Reputation and social network analysis in multi-agent systems,'' in Proceedings of the First International Joint conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. ACM Press, 2002, pp. 475-482.

  109. T. W. Sandholm, ''Distributed rational decision making,'' in G. Weiss, (ed.), Multiagent Systems: A Modern Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1999, pp. 201-258.

    Google Scholar 

  110. J. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1969.

    Google Scholar 

  111. O. Shehory and S. Kraus, ''Methods for task allocation via agent coalition formation,'' Artif. Intell., vol. 101, no. 1-2, pp. 165-200, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  112. C. Sierra and F. Dignum, ''Agent-mediated electronic commerce: Scientific and technological roadmap,'' in F. Dignum and C. Sierra, (eds.), Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce: The European AgentLink Perspective, vol. 1991 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2001, pp. 1-18.

  113. M. P. Singh, ''Agent communication languages: Rethinking the principles,'' IEEE Comput., vol. 31, no. 12, pp. 40-47, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  114. R. G. Smith and R. Davis, ''Frameworks for cooperation in distributed problem solving,'' IEEE Trans. Syst. Man, Cyber., vol. 11, no. 1, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  115. N. Streitz, ''Interaction design for the disappearing computer,'' in E. H. L. Aarts, R. Collier, E. van Loenen, and B. E. R. de Ruyter, (eds.), Ambient Intelligence, Vol. 2875 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2003, pp. 351-355.

  116. K. Sycara, M. Paolucci, M. van Velsen, and J. Giampapa, ''The RETSINA MAS Infrastructure,'' Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, vol. 7, no. 1-2, pp. 29-48, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  117. L. Tesfatsion, ''Agent-based computational economics: Growing economies from the bottom up,'' Artif. Life, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 55-82, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  118. F. Tohme and T. Sandholm, ''Coalition formation processes with belief revision among boundedrational self-interested agents,'' J. Logic Comput., vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 793-815, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  119. D. Trastour, C. Bartolini, and C. Preist, ''Semantic web support for the business-to-business e-commerce pre-contractual lifecycle,'' Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 661-673, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  120. C. F. Tschudin, ''Mobile agent security,'' in M. Klusch, (ed.), Intell. Inform. Agents, Springer, 1999. pp. 431-446.

  121. K. Tuyls, ''Learning in multi-agent systems: An evolutionary game theoretic approach,'' Phd thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, Belgium, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  122. W. W. Vasconcelos, J. Sabater, C. Sierra, and J. Querol, ''Skeleton-based agent development for electronic institutions,'' in Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. ACM Press, 2002, pp. 696-703.

  123. G. Vigna, ''Cryptographic traces for mobile agents,'' in G. Vigna, (ed.), Mobile Agents and Security, vol. 1419 of LNCS, Springer-Verlag, 1998, pp. 137-153.

  124. G. Weiss, ''Agent orientation in software engineering,'' Knowl. Eng. Rev., vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 349-373, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  125. M. P. Wellman, A. R. Greenwald, P. Stone, and P. R. Wurman, ''The 2001 Trading Agent Competition,'' Electron. Markets, vol. 13, no. 1, 2002.

  126. J. E. White, ''Mobile Agents,'' in J. M. Bradshaw (ed.), Software Agents, AAAI Press / The MIT Press, 1997, pp. 437-472.

  127. S. Willmott, U. Cortes, and D. Cabanillas, ''Standards for Agent Development,'' in M. Luck, R. Ashri, and M. d'Inverno, (eds.), Agent-Based Software Development, Artech House: Norwood, MA, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  128. M. J. Wooldridge, ''The logical modelling of computational multi-agent systems,'' Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, Manchester UK, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  129. M. Wooldridge and P. Ciancarini, ''Agent-Oriented software engineering: The state of the art,'' in P. Ciancarini and M. Wooldridge, (eds.), Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, vol. 1957 of LNCS, Springer, 2001, pp. 1-28.

  130. M. Wooldridge, N. R. Jennings, and D. Kinny, ''The gaia methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design,'' Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 285-312, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  131. F. Zambonelli and H. Parunak, ''Signs of a revolution in computer science and software engineering,'' in P. Petta, R. Tolksdorf, and F. Zambonelli, (eds.), Engineering Societies in the Agents World (ESAW 2002), Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2003, pp. 13-28.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    Michael Luck

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZF, UK

    Peter McBurney

  3. HP Labs, Filton Road, Stoke Gifford, Bristol BS34 8QZ, UK

    Chris Preist

Authors
  1. Michael Luck
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Peter McBurney
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Chris Preist
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Luck, M., McBurney, P. & Preist, C. A Manifesto for Agent Technology: Towards Next Generation Computing. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 9, 203–252 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:AGNT.0000038027.29035.7c

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:AGNT.0000038027.29035.7c

Search

Navigation