A review of agent-based systems applied in environmental informatics

During the last few years, agents and agent-based systems have attracted a significant amount of attention from researchers in environmental informatics. Agent-based approaches have been adopted for developing environmental systems for data management, decision support or simulation purposes. In order to identify the degree of penetration of agent technology in environmental software systems, over twenty applications reported in the recent literature have been reviewed from a software engineering perspective. These applications use agent-based approaches and methods, either as metaphor for software design or as an abstraction for software development. As a software design metaphor, agents are considered as the building blocks of a system. Agent related technologies for software design include techniques for system requirements specification, software modelling, specification and verification. Taking a step ahead, agent technology has moved to agent-oriented software engineering that adopts agents in the whole software design process, as for example in GAIA. On the second front (that of software implementation) there is a plethora of agent deployment strategies that might vary from object oriented programming and custom multi-agent systems to agent platforms. The latter have emerged as the evolution of object-oriented programming and distributed computing, and utilize agents as the basic software unit for developing systems. This paper attempts to summarize recent developments in environmental informatics that exploit agent technology. All the applications presented in this paper have been evaluated from a software point of view, i.e. the adoption of agent technologies for software design or/and implementation is in the focus. The result of this survey provides an outlook of agent use in environmental software, illustrated graphically in Figure 1. The main conclusion of this presentation is that agent technology has been only partially adopted in environmental informatics. There is still space for exploiting agent technology in environmental software, by adopting agent-oriented software engineering and agent programming techniques in future developments. (Figure Presented).