TY  - JOUR
T1  - Agent Environments for Multi-Agent Systems–A Research Roadmap
A1  - Weyns, Danny
A1  - Michel, Fabien
A1  - Parunak, H Van Dyke
A1  - Boissier, Olivier
A1  - Schumacher, Michael
A1  - Ricci, Alessandro
A1  - Brandao, Anarosa
A1  - Dikenelli, Oguz
A1  - Galland, Stépane
A1  - Pijoan, Ander
A1  - Simo Kanmeugne, Patrick
A1  - PatrickRodriguez-Aguilar, Juan
A1  - Saunier, Julien
A1  - Urovi, Visara
A1  - Zambonelli, Franco
JA  - Springer
Y1  - 2015
KW  - Agent Environment
KW  - human in the loop
KW  - large - scale  systems
KW  - Middleware
KW  - multi - agent   systems
KW  - open systems
N2  - Ten  years  ago,  researchers  in  multi-agent  systems  became  more  and more  aware  that  agent  systems  consist  of  more  than  only  agents.  The  series  of 
workshops on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems (E4MAS 2004-2006) emerged 
from this awareness. One of the primary outcomes of this endeavor was a principled 
understanding  that  the  agent  environment  should  be  considered  as  a  primary  design abstraction,  equally  important  as  the  agents.  A  special  issue  in  JAAMAS  2007 contributed  a  set  of  influential  papers  that  define  the  role  of  agent  environments, describe their  engineering,  and outline  challenges  in  the  field
that  have  been  the drivers for numerous follow up research efforts. The goal of this paper is to wrap up what  has  been  achieved  in  the  past  10  years  and  identify  challenges  for  future research  on  agent  environments.  Instead  of  taking  a  broad  perspective,  we  focus  on three  particularly  relevant  topics  of  modern  software  intensive  systems:  large  scale, openness,  and  humans  in  the  loop.  For  each  topic,  we  reflect  on  the  challenges outlined  10  years  ago,  present  an  example  application  that  highlights  the  current trends, and from that outline challenges for the future. We conclude with a roadmap on how the different challenges could be tackled.
ER  -