The Engineering Process

Engineering highly flexible software systems for real-world applications on the basis of intelligent agents and multiagent systems is a challenging task. Conventional software engineering provides established methodologies and tool support. Additionally, knowledge engineering captures the necessary aspects of integrating knowledge in intelligent agents. However there is still a gap between software and knowledge engineering methodologies. State-of-the-art approaches of agent-oriented software engineering partially integrate these approaches. Nevertheless, challenges for the engineering process of agent technology remain open and therefore are addressed in this section on agent engineering.