Multi-agent systems: A software architecture viewpoint

Studies in agent-oriented software engineering address the merit of agents and multi-agent systems as a software architecture style, though only in part. MAS software architecture styles are of interest to both the MAS and the software engineering communities. This chapter provides an introduction to these software architectures. As we demonstrate, MAS implementations spanning across decades have several common architectural characteristics, despite different design and implementation details. An important question associated with MAS development is whether MAS constitute an appropriate solution for a computational problem at hand, and if so, what type of MAS should be preferred for that solution? Preferably, this question better be answered early on, to prevent the use of MAS as a solution approach where simpler, more efficient solutions apply. MAS should be considered among an array of alternative solution approaches. To assist system designers in their assessment of MAS as a solution approach to their problem, we present architectural properties of MAS and we demonstrate these properties by example.