Towards a framework for evaluating AOSE methodologies from agent and generic software en gineering perspectives

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.