To manage the increasing complexity of industrial-strength software
systems is a highly challenging task, despite the tremendous progress
achieved in software engineering in the past decades. Since some
years, agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) is receiving
steadily growing attention as a very promising response to this
challenge. To develop software agent-oriented means to design,
implement and analyze its structure and function from the perspective
of agents (i.e., computational entities that act and interact
autonomously, flexibly and on the basis of semantically rich
communication). Compared to other software development principles
such as object and component orientation, agent orientation allows to
tackle software complexity in an intuitively clear way at a
qualitatively new and complementary level of abstraction.
The AOSE-specific work within the AI/Cognition group has primarily
focused on the specification of autonomy as as software property, on
agent-oriented methods and tools for software development, and on the
utilization of social theories and concepts for agent-oriented
software construction.
Other research foci of the AI/Cognition group.