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.