Modelling and Design of Multi-Agent Systems

Agent technologies are now being applied to the development of large scale commercial and industrial software systems Such systems are complex involving hundreds perhaps thousands of agents and there is a pressing need for system modelling techniques that permit their com plexity to be e ectively managed and principled methodologies to guide the process of system design Without adequate techniques to support the design process such systems will not be su ciently reliable maintainable or extensible will be di cult to comprehend and their elements will not be re usable In this paper we present techniques for modelling agents and multi agent systems which adapt and extend existing Object Oriented representation techniques and a methodology which provides a clear conceptual frame work to guide system design and speci cation We have developed these techniques for systems of agents based upon a particular Belief Desire Intention architecture but have sought to provide a framework for the description of agent systems that is su ciently general to be applicable to other agent architectures and which may be extended in various ways