Analysis and design of Information Systems (ISs) is the process of eliciting the system's requirements and transforming them into a model that can be used to develop ISs. Analysis and design of Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOISs) relates to the very same process using the multi-agent paradigm. A comprehensive and rigorous methodology for developing multi-agent systems is lacking (Elammari & Lalonde, 1999; Odell et al., 2000). Most existing multi-agent systems were developed in an ad-hoc manner, and systems developers paid little attention to requirements specification and the analysis process (Treur, 1999a).

The paper has two goals: (a) to provide an overview and (b) to discuss challenges and future research of the field. To address the first goal, we review different methodologies that are suitable for analysing and designing AOIS. This is done by examining, for each methodology, its suitability in supporting the early phases of the software engineering process (specifically analysis and design) as well as its capabilities for modelling agent-oriented systems. To address the second goal, we analyse the limitations of existing approaches, identify critical issues and point to what we think are possible future directions.

In this paper, we provide a review of concepts and developments in operating procedure synthesis (OPS), starting from its early development through to its current state. Operating procedure synthesis is a problem in which a set of equipment manipulations and their orderings must be generated to take the process from an initial state to a goal state. While there has been ongoing research for about 30 years in this area, only a few systems have been reported to be industrially deployed. The approach taken in this paper is, first, to describe the problem in general terms; second, to discuss previous work in this area; and, finally, to present ideas and directions for future work.

1 Introduction

UKMAS has now been running for six years, in 1996 and 1997 under the heading of FoMAS (Foundations of Multi-Agent Systems) both organised by Michael Luck at Warwick University and then subsequently in its current incarnation, UKMAS, first by Michael Fisher at Manchester Metropolitan University then by Chris Preist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol and finally by Mark d'Inverno at St Catherine's College, Oxford in 2000. After the success of the workshop last year at St Catherine's in providing an excellent opportunity for academics and industrialists to come together to discuss current work and directions in the multi-agent systems field, it was decided by the steering committee to use St Catherine's once again as the venue for UKMAS 2001. The workshop was sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and by AgentLink, the European Commission's IST-funded Network of Excellence for Agent-Based Computing.