Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based computing as they pertain to agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, we argue that a multiagent system can naturally be viewed and architected as a computational organization, and we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems. Second, we detail and extend the Gaia methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Gaia exploits the aforementioned organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open software systems. Two representative case studies are introduced to exemplify Gaia's concepts and to show its use and effectiveness in different types of multiagent system.

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Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology

Build your own intelligent agent system. Intelligent agent technology is a tool of modern computer science that can be used to engineer complex computer programmes that behave rationally in dynamic and changing environments. Applications range from small programmes that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commerce, to autonomous space probes. This powerful technology is not widely used, however, as developing intelligent agent software requires high levels of training and skill. The authors of this book have developed and tested a methodology and tools for developing intelligent agent systems. With this methodology (Prometheus) developers can start agent-oriented designs and implementations easily from scratch saving valuable time and resources. Developing Intelligent Agent Systems not only answers the questions 'what are agents?' and 'why are they useful?' but also the crucial question: 'how do I design and build intelligent agent systems?' The book covers everything a practitioner needs to know to begin to effectively use this technology - including an introduction to the notion of agents, a description of the concepts involved, and a software engineering methodology.

Developing Intelligent Agent Systems: A Practical Guide

As agents gain acceptance as a technology there is a growing need for practical methods for developing agent applications. This paper presents the Prometheus methodology, which has been developed over several years in collaboration with Agent Oriented Software. The methodology has been taught at industry workshops and university courses. It has proven effective in assisting developers to design, document, and build agent systems. Prometheus differs from existing methodologies in that it is a detailed and complete (start to end) methodology for developing intelligent agents which has evolved out of industrial and pedagogical experience. This paper describes the process and the products of the methodology illustrated by a running example.

Prometheus: a methodology for developing intelligent agents

INGENIAS is both a methodology and a set of tools for development of multi-agent systems (MAS). As a methodology, it tries to integrate results from other proposals and considers the MAS from five complementary viewpoints: organization, agent, tasks/goals, interactions, and environment. It is supported by a set of tools for modelling (graphical editor), documentation and code generation (for different agent platforms). INGENIAS is the result of the experience developing MAS in different areas, such as workflow management systems, recommender systems, Robocode teams, and PC assistants

Agent oriented software engineering with INGENIAS

This paper describes the Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology. MaSE is a general purpose, methodology for developing heterogeneous multiagent systems. MaSE uses a number of graphically based models to describe system goals, behaviors, agent types, and agent communication interfaces. MaSE also provides a way to specify architecture-independent detailed definition of the internal agent design. An example of applying the MaSE methodology is also presented.

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Multiagent systems engineering

Multiagent systems have been touted as a way to meet the need for distributed software systems that must operate in dynamic and complex environments. However, in order for multiagent systems to be effective, they must be reliable and robust. Engineering multiagent systems is a non-trivial task, providing ample opportunity for even experts to make mistakes. Formal transformation systems can provide automated support for synthesizing multiagent systems, which can greatly improve their correctness and reliability. This paper describes a semi-automated transformation system that generates an agent's internal architecture from an analysis specification in the MaSE methodology.

Automated derivation of complex agent architectures from analysis specifications

http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~sdeloach/publications/Conference/sparkman-LNCS-paper.pdf

Clint H. Sparkman

Papers

Multiagent systems engineering

Automated derivation of complex agent architectures from analysis specifications

Automated Derivation of Complex Agent Architectures from Analysis Specifications