Rapid changes in the business environment call for more flexible and adaptive workflow systems. Researchers have proposed that Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) comprising multiple agents can provide these capabilities. ...

Norms are shared expectations of behaviours that exist in human societies. Norms help societies by increasing the predictability of individual behaviours and by improving co-operation and collaboration among members. Norms ...

An area where multi-agent systems can be put to effective use is for the case of an open collection of autonomous problem solvers in a dynamically changing environment. One example of such a situation is that of environmental ...

An architecture, and the accompanying infrastructural support, for agent-based software developement is described which supports the use of agent-oriented ideas at multiple levels of abstraction. At the lowest level are ...

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) as a formalism for defining an abstract syntax for Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) and their associated content languages. It describes an approach ...

Ontologies play an important role in defining the terminology that agents use in the exchange of knowledge-level messages. As object-oriented modelling, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) in particular, have built up ...

In FIPA-style multi-agent systems, agents coordinate their activities by sending messages representing particular communicative acts (or performatives). Agent communication languages must strike a balance between simplicity ...

Agent-oriented software engineering is a promising new approach to software engineering that uses the notion of an agent as the primary entity of abstraction. The development of methodologies for agent-oriented software ...

The use of modelling abstractions to map from items in the real-world to objects in the computational domain is useful both for the effective implementation of abstract problem solutions and for the management of software ...

In this paper we propose a mechanism for norm emergence based on role models. The mechanism uses the concept of normative advice whereby the role models provide advice to the follower agents. Our mechanism is built using ...