Industry traction for MAS technology: would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Abstract

The Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) community faces a crisis that many are unwilling to acknowledge. We are all acutely aware of how MAS concepts and technologies seem to have failed to gain significant industry traction (a few notable exceptions aside). Other research communities (e.g., the service-oriented computing community) have gained far greater industry acceptance for their outputs, in far shorter time. But the crisis stems from an even greater threat: the co-opting of agents/MAS concepts in other research communities, particularly the service-oriented computing community. This position paper argues that the MAS community must respond to this challenge via a closer engagement with the service-oriented computing community, by using the notion of services as an implementation vehicle for MAS technology, by better articulating the industry value proposition of MAS technology in software engineering terms and by paying attention to nomenclature.