We’ve been going on and on over the last few weeks about the Long Tail, and how the need for mass customisation that it demands might be met by multi-agent system thinking - or what you might call MAS customisation.

Multi-agent systems have been causing a storm in academic computer science over the past decade or so. Gartner developed a hype-cycle analysis. Platforms and tools abound. The IEEE standardizes. But the technology has so far failed to make it in to the mainstream, due in large part to its lack-luster appeal as far as the alpha-geek community is concerned. Things, however, are starting to change. Russian oil tankers, European organ transplants, US parcels, Swedish electricity and Scottish patients are all making day-to-day use of robust agent software. As industrial strength solutions appear, and agents start to contribute to social networking apps, mechanical Turk orchestration, ubiquitous comms and the rest of the emerging post-Web 2.0 world, real interest is starting to grow. CRM seen from a multi-agent thinking point of view becomes customer-centric with an agent trying to figure out what is best for the customer it represents. Health-care data systems become patient-centric, with an agent offering a single point of contact to a web of care. Logistics becomes a parcel-centric series of localized negotiations between the agent representing the goods and those representing storage and transport facilities. Multi-agent thinking supports “centric”-centric design, engineering, deployment and maintenance of complex software that encourages rich ecosystems for development and execution. The trick is going to be tying centric-centric design into the big SOAs which are going to continue to dominate in the medium-term (even though they’re starting to lose their sheen).