Marc Esteva

Engineering open environments with electronic institutions

Nowadays, with the expansion of Internet, there is a need of methodologies and software tools to ease the development of applications where distributed homogeneous entities can participate. Multiagent systems, and electronic institutions in particular, can play a main role in the development of this type of systems. Electronic institutions define the rules of the game in agent societies, by fixing what agents are permitted and forbidden to do and under what circumstances. The goal of this paper is to present EIDE, an integrated development environment for supporting the engineering of multiagent systems as electronic institutions.

An Integrated Development Environment for Electronic Institutions

There is an increasing need of methodologies and software tools that ease the development of applications where distributed heterogeneous entities can participate. Multi-agent systems, and electronic institutions in particular, can play a main role on the development of this type of systems. Electronic institutions define the rules of the game in agent societies, by fixing what agents are permitted and forbidden to do and under what circumstances. The goal of this paper is to introduce an integrated development environment that supports the engineering of electronic institutions.

Smooth scaling ahead: progressive MAS simulation from single PCs to grids

The emerging “Computational Grid” infrastructure poses many new opportunities for the developing science of large scale multi-agent simulation. The ability to migrate agent experiments seamlessly from simple, local single-processor development tools to large-scale distributed simulation environments provides valuable new models for experimentation and software engineering: first develop local, flexible prototypes, then as they become more stable progressively deploy and experiment with them at larger scales. Currently this kind of progressive scalability is hard for both practical and theoretical reasons: Practically, most agent platforms are designed for just one environment of operation. Smooth scalability is more than a matter of increasing agent numbers. Smooth scaling requires clear integration and consistent alignment between a variety of MAS system and simulation architectures and differing underlying infrastructures. This paper reports on recent progress with our experimental platform MACE3J, which now simulates MAS models seamlessly across a variety of scales and architecture types, from single PCs, to Single System Image (SSI) multicomputers, to heterogeneous distributed Grid environments.

An Environment to Build and Track Agent-Based Business Collaboration

This chapter describes an environment to support the rapid assembly of agent-oriented business collaborations. Our environment allows: (i) setting up a collaboration environment as a virtual organization; (ii) reaching agreements within the collaboration environment to form short-term business collaborations; (iii) enacting business collaborations; and (iv) tracking the performance of agents within business collaborations to build their trust and reputation within the collaboration environment.