The concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting with
other agents in order to satisy its design objectives, is a natural one for software
designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of
essentially passive objects, which have state, and upon which we can perform
operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting,
semi-autonomous agents. This paradigm is especially suited to complex systems.
Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components,
each with their own thread of control, and engaging in complex coordination protocols,
are typically orders of magnitude more complex to correctly and efficiently
engineer than those that simply compute a function of some input through a single
thread of control, or through a limited set of stricly synchronized threads
of control. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are especially useful in such
applications.