In open dynamic multi-agent environments the number of agents can vary significantly within very short periods of time.Very few (if any) current multi-agent systems have, however, been designed to cope with large-scale distributed applications.Scalability requires increasing numbers of new agents and resources to have no noticeable effect on performance nor to increase administrative complexity.In this paper a number of implications for techniques and management are discussed.Current research on agent middleware is briefly described.
Brazier et al. (2001) studied this question.