Abstract: Agent oriented software engineering is a novel software paradigm that is considered as an important approach to supporting the development of complex software systems based on agent technology. Many attentions had been paid by researchers in academic literature and practitioners in industry literature. In the past ten years,great progresses of Agent oriented software engineering has been made. However, there are still a great number of problems that should be solved before it moves to industry application and its potentials should be exploited extensively. After investigating the background and characteristics of agent oriented software engineering, the paper overviewed the statcof-thcart of the researches on agent-oriented software engineering, identified and analyzed a number of key challenges of such technology, outlooked and discussed the future directions from technique, process and tool viewpoints.

Key words: Agent, Multi-agent system, Agent-oriented software engineering