Satellite MAS

Position Statement FOSE-MAS 2008 – Danny Weyns

Life on satellite MAS

When we engineer multi-agent systems (1)

• Do we ask ourselves the question why we select MAS as a solution in the first place? – What are the concrete motivations – what are

the tradeoffs?

• What about the typical non-functional (quality) concerns? – Usability, maintainability, …ility, budget, ….– How do they relate to real stakeholders

When we engineer multi-agent systems (2)

• What about integrating the MAS with its software environment? – Software programming environment,

frameworks, middleware, legacy systems, etc.

• What about the evaluation of the MAS architecture?– How well will the MAS achieve its functional

and quality goals?

When we engineer multi-agent systems (3)

• What is the impact of introducing MAS on an organization?– Correspondence of software architecture with

developing organization

• Why are we not really concerned with all these issues that are crucial in practice?

Challenges ahead

• Each of these issues provides a challenge for FOSE-MAS– Why (not) using a MAS architecture? – Qualities of MAS, tradeoffs– Integrating MAS with its software environment– Evaluation of MAS architectures

• Verification of system-wide properties of decentralized architectures

– Impact of MAS on the developing environment

Earth is calling satellite MAS

• To tackle the increasing problems of software systems, mainstream SE needs our expertise! – E.g. to develop self-managing systems

• Grounding MAS engineering in mainstream SE is a key to (industrial) adoption of MAS