Current issues in multi-agent systems development

This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in developing multi-agent systems and sets out to answer the questions: "what are the key current issues in developing multi-agent systems?" and "what should we, as a research community, be paying particular attention to, over the next few years?". Based on our characterisation of the current state-of-the-art in developing MAS, we identify three key areas for future work: techniques for integrating design and code, extending agent-oriented programming languages to cover certain aspects that are currently weak or missing (e.g., social concepts, and modelling the environment); and development of debugging and verification techniques, with a particular focus on using model checking also in testing and debugging, and applying model checking to design artefacts