Multiagent Engineering

This book gives detailed descriptions of the development of two large scale multiagent systems: Agent.Hospital and Agent.Enterprise. These two systems have been developed in close cooperation with more than 20 enterprises and hospitals. They demonstrate clearly that multiagent technology has a great potential for innovative information systems, if a high degree of flexibility of the overall systems is required, e.g. because human actors and technical systems exhibit a great degree of local autonomy, or if the work environment is highly dynamic.

Résumé
1 Multiagent Engineering: A New Software Construction Paradigm Multiagent systems have a long academic tradition. They have their roots in distributed problem solving in Artificial Intelligence (AI) from where they emerged in the mid-eighties as a distinctive discipline. Research in multiagent systems owes much to the work of Rosenschein on rationality and autonomy of intelligent agents, the European MAAMAW workshop series, and last but not least the famous readings of Bond & Gasser (1988) and Jacques Ferber´s book on multiagent systems (1991). It gained further by a public discussion via the Distributed AI mailing list in summer 1991, when the pioneers of the field compared in much detail the concepts of distributed problem solvers to multiagent systems. Within only five years, a new exciting field of research had been established. Now, 15 years later, the field has matured to a degree that allows the - sults of academic research to be passed on to practical use and commercial exploitation. This potential coincides with a need for much larger flexib- ity of our IT infrastructure in light of its highly distributed character and extreme complexity, but also the global character of the business processes and the large number of business partners due to outsourcing and specia- zation. Many experts claim that multiagent systems are the right software technology for the needed IT infrastructure at the right time. The appeal has much to do with the broad perspectives of multiagent systems research.

Contenu
Management Summary.- Management Summary.- What Agents Are and What They Are Good For.- Agents.- From Agents to Multiagent Systems.- Flexibility of Multiagent Systems.- Application Examples I: Agent.Enterprise.- Agent.Enterprise in a Nutshell.- Integrated Process Planning and Production Control.- Benchmarking of Multiagent Systems in a Production Planning and Control Environment.- Distributed Hierarchical Production Control for Wafer Fabs Using an Agent-Based System Prototype.- Supply Chain Event Management With Software Agents.- Trust-Based Distributed Supply-Web Negotiations.- Application Examples II: Agent.Hospital.- Agent.Hospital Health Care Applications of Intelligent Agents.- Artificial Software Agents as Representatives of Their Human Principals in Operating-Room-Team-Forming.- Agent-Based Information Logistics.- Agent-Based Patient Scheduling in Hospitals.- Adaptivity and Scheduling.- Active, Medical Documents in Health Care.- Self-Organized Scheduling in Hospitals by Connecting Agents and Mobile Devices.- Agent Engineering.- The Engineering Process.- Requirements Engineering.- Interaction Design.- Architectural Design.- Semantics for Agents.- Towards Dependable Agent Systems.- Tools and Standards.- From Testing to Theorem Proving.- Evaluation.- Benchmarking of Multiagent Systems.- Simulation.- Legal Consequences of Agent Deployment.