A New General, Flexible and Java-based Software Development Tool for Multiagent Systems

There has been a great interest in using multiagent systems (MAS) in a wide variety of applications in recent years, especially Webbased applications such as those in the field of electronic commerce. Agent-oriented methodologies, development environment and tools have become a priority for the development of large-scale agent-based systems. The work we present here belongs to the disciplines of Software Engineering and Distributed Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, we are interested in software engineering tools involved in the development of multiagent systems (MAS), particularly Java-based software tools that can facilitate the development of MAS. This paper is a logical extension of our recent research on MAS. Initially we studied MAS development methodologies. Then, we considered MAS development tools and environments that we evaluated and compared. This comparative evaluation was carried out in order to identify tools’ and environments’ strong points, as well as weak points, in the hope of determining what a complete development environment should look like. Finally, we undertook the development of a complete MAS development environment essentially meeting the set of requirements identified in our comparative study. Everything related to our MAS development environment/tool in this paper is 100% implemented in Java. At the time of writing, we are conducting a testing phase in which many people participate, all being external to our research team.