Contributions to the emergence and consolidation of Agent-oriented Software Engineering

Many of the issues addressed with multi-agent approaches, such as distributed coordination and self-organization, are now becoming part of industrial and business systems. However, Multiagent Systems (MASs) are still not widely adopted in industry owing to the lack of a connection between MAS and software engineering. Since 2000, there is an effort to bridge this gap and to produce software engineering techniques for agent-based systems that guide the processes of design, development and maintenance. In Brazil, Agent-oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) was first investigated by the research group in the Software Engineering Laboratory (LES) at PUC-Rio, which after one decade of study in this area has built an AOSE community. This paper presents the history of AOSE at LES by discussing the sub-areas of MAS Software Engineering research and development that have been focus of the LES research group. We give examples of relevant results and present a subset of the extensive literature the group has produced during the last decade. We also report how we faced the challenges that emerged from our research by organizing and developing a research community at the intersection of software engineering, programming and MASs with a concern for scalability of solutions.

► Retrospective of the emergence of Agent-oriented Software Engineering in Brazil. ► Overview of work developed on many AOSE sub-areas at the Software Engineering Laboratory at PUC-Rio. ► Description of steps taken to form the AOSE community in Brazil. ► Presentation of the number of publications and projects.