Abstract:
Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a software paradigm
which combines artificial intelligence concepts into software engineering
domain. The mainconcept of AOSE is the Agent. In AOSE, the agent has
specific characteristics such as autonomy, mental mechanism and
adaptability. Characteristics of a multi agent based software system differ
from a generic software system because of this specific behavior of agent.
Several evaluation frameworks and criteria have been proposed to evalu ate
characteristics of multi agent systems. These frameworks propose
evaluationevaluations of agent oriented system development methodologies based on
different categorization categorizations of characteristics related to multi agent systems as
well as different characteristics of generic software engineering processes.
The focus of this study is to address the problem of developing a
framework, to evaluate multi agent systems development methodologies,
that combines both agent oriented characteristics and generic software
engineer ing characteristics. To address this problem, our objective in this
research is to examine some of the existing frameworks for evaluating
charecteristics of multi sgent systems and to propose a more generic
framework to describe the characteristics of a mu lti agent system by
considering agent oriented as well as generic software engineering
paradigms.The framework consists of a two dimensional matrix with
twenty eight characteristics. One dimension of the matrix conerns four
generic components (model, proce ss, technique and supportive features)
related to software development. The other dimension concerns the
characteristics of software agents and the generic software engineering
charcharacteristics. The proposed framework is evaluated by applying
Prometheus and MaSE methodologies, which are considered as prominent
and comprehensive AOSE methodologies.
