On agent-based software engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Constraining autonomy through norms
Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: part 2
Social Order in Multiagent Systems
Social Order in Multiagent Systems
Towards A Role-Based Framework for DistributedSystems Management
Journal of Network and Systems Management
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Agent orientation in software engineering
The Knowledge Engineering Review
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering III
AOSE'02 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering III
Specifying the intertwining of cooperation and autonomy in agent-based systems
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
On the modularity assessment of aspect-oriented multiagent architectures: a quantitative study
International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
An aspect-oriented modeling framework for multi-agent systems design
AOSE'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering VII
MIC*: a deployment environment for autonomous agents
E4MAS'04 Proceedings of the First international conference on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems
Operational modelling of agent autonomy: theoretical aspects and a formal language
AOSE'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
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A key question in the field of agent-oriented software engineering is how the kind and extent of autonomy owned by computational agents can be appropriately captured. As long as this question is not answered convincingly, it is very unlikely that agent-oriented software (having "autonomy" as a real property rather than just a catchy label) gets broadly accepted in industry and commerce. In particular, in order to be of practical value an answer to this question has to come in form of concrete techniques which enable developers of agent-oriented software to precisely capture the scope of behavioral freedom and self-control they want to concede to a computational agent. This paper describes two such techniques. First, a formal schema called RNS for specifying the boundaries of autonomous agent behavior. This schema is conceptually grounded in sociological role theory, and employs the concepts of role, norm and sanction to capture agent autonomy. What makes RNS particularly valuable and distinct from related autonomy specification approaches is, among other things, its strong expressiveness and high precision. Second, a software tool called XRNS which enables developers to easily generate RNS-based autonomy specifications in XML format. Encoded in XML, these specifications are easily accessible to all stakeholders in an agent-oriented software under development, and can be even processed directly by XML enabled computational agents.