Multi-Agent Technology for Industrial Applications: Barriers and Trends

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have been an area of high expectations of the industrial IT community. However, in reality, these expectations are still not met and, in practice, the industry very rarely uses the MAS design methodologies, technologies, and software tools despite the appearance of many new classes of applications for which the MAS paradigm could be the perfect match. This paper analyzes the barriers and trends of the mismatch between the recent industrial anticipations and the real state of the practical use of MAS. It identifies engineering problems with very little re-use of code that currently stops economics of scale and impedes the extensive industrial MAS deployment and the ways to overcome them.