Multiagent Systems

Agent-based systems technology has generated lots of excitement in recent years because of its promise as a new paradigm for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing software systems. Currently, the great majority of agent-based systems consist of a single agent. Central to the design and effective operation of such multiagent systems (MASs) are a core set of issues and research questions that have been studied over the years by the distributed AI community. In this article, I present some of the critical notions in MASs and the research work that has addressed them.