Juan Pavón Mestras (born 19 November 1962 in Algeciras, Spain) is a Spanish computer scientist and full professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), with ties to the Technical University of Madrid and Université Pierre et Marie Curie.^[4] He is a pioneer researcher in the field of software agents, co-creator of the FIPA MESSAGE and INGENIAS methodologies, and founder and director of the research group GRASIA: GRoup of Agent-based, Social and Interdisciplinary Applications at UCM.^[3] Known for his work in artificial intelligence—specifically in agent-oriented software engineering, metamodelling, and artificial intelligence applications—he is often cited by mainstream media as a reference in the field.^[6,7,8,9]

Pavón belongs to the first Spanish generation to get official studies in Computer Science during the 1980s.^[11] He studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Madrid, graduating in 1985. In 1988, he obtained his PhD in this area with the thesis "Synthesis of communication protocols from service specifications", having worked as an assistant professor at the same university while completing his doctoral studies.^[12] After completing his PhD, he joined the Alcatel-Lucent R&D team, where he worked for 10 years. At the end of 1997, he got an Associate Professor position at UCM, and in 2006, he achieved the Habilitation à diriger des recherches qualification in Computer Science at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) with the thesis "INGENIAS : Développement Dirigé par Modèles des Systèmes Multi-Agents" (in French).^[13]

He joined the Alcatel R&D department as a systems engineer, where he worked on the development of software component-based architectures for distributed systems and its applications for multimedia services over broadband networks and new generation mobile phones. During the 10 years he worked for the company, he spent periods in Alcatel centers outside Spain, such as France (Lannion and Vélizy) and Belgium (Namur and Antwerp). In this period, he worked several years in the labs of Bellcore in Red Bank, New Jersey (USA), working in the TINA-C Core Team, and helping to produce architectural models for telecommunication services. As a result, he published several popular works.^[15,16]

He then returned to the academic world as an Associate Professor at the Computer Science School of the Complutense University of Madrid in 1997. By then, he researched Multi-Agent Systems within the Eurescom project P815 "Communications Management Process Integration Using Software Agents" (1999), working with Telefónica R+D.^[17] His work in several projects combines software engineering practices and MAS. In the Eurescom P907 "Methodology for Engineering Systems of Software Agents", he co-created the MESSAGE methodology, currently part of the main FIPA software agent methodologies.^[19,11,18] In 2000, he established the research group GRASIA for research in Software Agents and Artificial Intelligence in the Complutense University of Madrid. He also held several management positions in the university, serving as Vice Dean for four years (1998–2002), and is nowadays a full professor at the Universidad Complutense Madrid.^[20]

Pavón's work has focused on software agents and agent-based simulation.^[21] His work on software agents began at the end of the 1990s, after they emerged as a new paradigm.^[22] His first project in the field was funded by Telefónica R+D, titled "Communications Management Process Integration Using Software Agents" (1999). He later secured research funding from the 5th European Framework Programme (PSI3, DEMOS) and from Eurescom (P815, P907), all of which are considered early applications of agents to software engineering processes.^[23] Within the Eurescom P907 project "Methodology for Engineering Systems of Software Agents", he co-created the MESSAGE methodology, which is currently part of the main FIPA software agent methodologies.^[19,11]

INGENIAS (Engineering for Software Agents) is a complete framework for the analysis, design, and implementation of multi-agent systems (MAS), serving as his main contribution combining agent concepts in software engineering through its methodology and toolkit.^[24] As a result of research in these years, Jorge J. Gómez-Sanz published in 2002 his PhD thesis "A Methodology for the Development of Multi-Agent Systems" (in Spanish), advised by Francisco Garijo and Juan Pavón, which constitutes the first version of the INGENIAS methodology and its meta-models.^[26]

Since its inception, INGENIAS has adopted a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach, which organizes developments around the specification of systems through models that are automatically transformed to generate other artefacts, such as code, tests, or documentation.^[27] INGENIAS follows these principles by specifying the MAS meta-models that define its modeling language and allow for automatically generating its development tools, distributed as the INGENIAS Development Kit (IDK).^[28] This approach supports research in different areas characterized by the use of modeling languages and requiring flexibility to adapt these to new requirements, and it has also been used in agent-based simulation.

The INGENIAS development process has been one of the few processes of agent-oriented methodologies to have its development process formally specified with SPEM, a language of the Object Management Group (OMG). Currently, there is one development process based on the Unified Process and another based on Scrum.^[31] The INGENIAS modeling language and the open-source tools for its application have made it a popular methodology in the agent literature, leading to its inclusion in relevant surveys and comparisons in the field.^[28] The open-source INGENIAS associated tools are also successful in the agent community, as assessed by their number of downloads.^[33]

The level of maturity reached by the INGENIAS framework and related tools, mainly INGENME, in its application to Software Agents allowed the GRASIA group to consider its application to other domains, with agent-based simulation being one immediate application. As in Software Agents, agent-based simulation (ABS) relies on the concept of an agent as the basic block to build computational simulations. The conceptual similarities between the concept of agent in both disciplines, as well as the suitability of models to work with simulations, made agent-based simulation a sensible extension for INGENIAS work.^[29,30] The use of INGENIAS for ABS is based on the adoption of MDE to build simulations, an approach that GRASIA developed and validated in different domains, such as urbanism and group work.^[35,36]

This line of research started in GRASIA with a direct application of INGENIAS works with software agents to ABS for Candelaria Sansores's 2007 PhD thesis, "A Methodology for the Study of Artificial Societies", advised by Pavonl.^[34] This work pointed out the suitability of applying the MDE approach of INGENIAS to this field, but also noted the problems researchers without a background in Software Engineering faced when using INGENIAS. While these first attempts were oriented toward simulations intended to verify behavioral principles described by well-known laws rather than exploring simulations based on large amounts of raw data, this data-driven agent-based social simulation was subsequently the subject of the interdisciplinary PhD thesis of Samer Hassan, "Towards a Data Driven Approach for Agent Based Modelling: Simulating Spanish Postmodernization", also advised by Juan Pavón.

He has achieved multiple agreements with relevant research groups, including ICAR-CNR, SenSysCal.it, INSISOC, and SMAC, as well as with industry partners such as Telefonica R+D and Boeing Research and Technology Europe.^{[37,38,39,40]} His topics of interest cover several disciplines, including the simulation of complex systems, agent-oriented software engineering, artificial intelligence applications, Responsible Research and Innovation, Ethics in AI, Smart Cities, Blockchain, Legal Tech, and inclusion tech.^{[50,51,52,41,42]}

Pavón joined the European research networks on Software Agents and Agent-based simulation, AgentLink and AgentCities, and has contributed to different international projects funded by the European Commission: VITAL, MOMOCS, PSI3, DEMOS, AGENTCITIES.NET, and P2Pvalue.^[5,53,55] He has worked on more than 30 research projects with public and private funding, leading 20 of them. He accounts for more than 260 scientific publications and holds an H-index of 34. He is a research consultant for dozens of committees, serves on the editorial boards of several journals in the field of computer science, and acts as a scientific project evaluator for the European Commission.^[59,14,58] Furthermore, he is a member of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence, the European Social Simulation Association, the FIPA board, the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, and the IEEE Computer Society.^[59,14,58]

In 2006, he received an honorary PhD from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6).^[60] His research group GRASIA has achieved recognition through several awards, including the AAMAS 2008 Best Academic Software Demo for INGENIAS. Additional group recognitions include the Best Paper Award at the 19th edition of the Semantic Search Workshop 2010 of the World Wide Web Conference, second prize in the Robotrader contest organized by the Technical University of Madrid in 2012, and selection as a featured article by the IEEE Special Technical Community on Social Networks in October 2012.

Pavón is the author of several books and more than 260 scientific articles on Software Agents, Artificial Intelligence, and Software Engineering.^[57,66] A selection of his highly cited works includes "Development of intelligent multisensor surveillance systems with agents," co-authored with Jorge Gómez-Sanz, Antonio Fernández-Caballero, and Julián J. Valencia-Jiménez (Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2007). He also co-authored "Multi-Agent Systems and Applications III" with Jorge Gómez-Sanz (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2003) and contributed to "Agent-Oriented Software Engineering II" alongside Giovanni Caire, Wim Coulier, Francisco Garijo, Jorge Gomez, Francisco Leal, Paulo Chainho, Paul Kearney, and Jamie Stark (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2002). His other selected publications include "Advances in Case-Based Reasoning," with Juan M. Corchado, Emilio S. Corchado, and Luis F. Castillo (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2004), and "FAML: A Generic Metamodel for MAS Development," with G. Beydoun, G. Low, B. Henderson-Sellers, H. Mouratidis, J. J. Gomez-Sanz, and C. Gonzalez-Perez (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, November 2009).