Towards a Natural Agent Paradigm Development Methodology

It is indisputable that software development using agents and, more specifically, the multi-agent systems concept has greater potential for dealing with complex problems than other more traditional approaches. The agent paradigm is acquiring the status of an engineering discipline and gradually leaving the laboratory and moving into industry. However, it has two major omissions: it is missing an agent modeling language and a consolidated development process such as the object paradigm now has. Although we do not provide a definitive answer to this question in this paper, we do try to help to solve the problem as it relates to the agent-oriented development process by considering what features an agent-based development methodology should have, pointing out the omissions of current methodologies and presenting the SONIA methodology that includes the required features.