The autonomous agent and multi-agent paradigm
in software engineering

Abstract. Research on distributed artificial intelligence became a large field of research which is nowadays called autonomous agent and multi-agent system research. The autonomous agent and multi-agent paradigm helps a lot to understand, model and develop software systems for applications where the whole system, or the different parts of the system cannot be under the direct control of a single ``authority''. This paper overviews the main characteristics of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, as well as their relation to the basic theoretical aspects of software engineering. The paper discusses the problems of complex multi-agent problem solving, and in particular the online routing game model.