Agents in industry: the best from the AAMAS 2005 industry track

Agent technology provides industrial-applications developers with new abstractions for distributed-system development, new methodological tools, and a set of algorithms for creating autonomous, collaborative systems. Over the past few years, a number of industrial applications have deployed agents. However, a substantial gap still exists between the cutting-edge research carried out mainly in university laboratories and research institutes and the domain-specific industrial applications that commercial organizations develop. This article gives some indication of agent technology´s readiness for commercial deployment, based primarily on the presentations and discussions at the inaugural Industry Track of AAMAS 2005 - the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.