Paradigms of Computational Agency

Today's information systems are complex, distributed, and need to scale over millions of users and a variety of devices, with guaranteed uptimes. As a result, top-down approaches for systems design and engineering are becoming increasingly infeasible. Starting sometime in the 1990s, a branch of systems engineering, has approached the problem of systemic complexity in a bottom-up fashion, by designing "autonomous" or "intelligent" agents that can proactively and autonomously act and decide on their own-to address specific, local issues pertaining to their immediate requirements. They also can communicate and coordinate with one another to jointly solve larger problems. The autonomous nature of agents require some form of a rationale that justifies their actions. Given that, objectoriented modeling had attracted mainstream attention at that time, the distinction between mechanistic "objects" and autonomous "agents" were often summarized with this slogan (Jennings et al., 1998): Objects do it for free, agents do it for money.