An increasing number of methodologies and modelling methods are being proposed in the area of agent-oriented software engineering. However, one of the open problems in order for agent-oriented software engineering to become a “mainstream” is a lack of consensus between the different analysis and design methods that have been proposed. Thus, this study proposes a framework to carry out an analys...

Many agent-oriented software engineering methodologies have been proposed for software developing; however their application is still limited due to their lack of maturity. Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of these methodologies plays an important role in improving them and in developing new stronger methodologies. This paper presents an evaluation framework for agent-oriented methodolog...

The discipline of Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) has emerged during the last decade. In this domain, methodologies and modeling techniques have been suggested in order to support the development process of agent-based systems. Both the scientific and industrial communities have recognized the potential advantages of agent-based systems. Nevertheless, the number of deployed commercia...

Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) researchers have successfully developed a range of agent programming languages that bridge the gap between theory and practice. Unfortunately, despite the incommunity success of these languages, they have proven less compelling to the wider software engineering community. One of the main problems facing AOP language developers is the need to bridge the cognitive...

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general hig...

After reviewing existing AOSE methodologies, we have the impression that some more work is still needed, from a software engineering viewpoint, in order to apply them in an industrial context. For instance, the software development process is usually summarized in four or five steps for analysis and design, which is not realistic. Just taking a look at the Rational Unified Process [4] is enough...

Although agents and agent-based computing have been around for some time it is only until now that these topics begin to gain attendance beyond the research community; it is being discovered by non-researches that agent technology is a powerful tool for the development of large and complex systems. These days, typical software architectures contain many dynamically interacting components, each ...

The use of modelling abstractions to map from items in the real-world to objects in the computational domain is useful both for the effective implementation of abstract problem solutions and for the management of software complexity. This paper discusses the new approach of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE), which uses the notion of an autonomous agent as its fundamental modelling abst...

Multi-agent systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over traditional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today’s corporate IT applications such as e-business systems, Web services, or enterprise knowledge bases. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional rather than object, functional, or implementation-oriented...

The key role of environment as a first-class abstraction in the engineering of MAS (multi-agent systems) is today generally acknowledged in the MAS community. However, the support for the notion of environment in today AOSE (agent-oriented software engineering) methodologies is still either absent, weak, or incomplete at best. In this paper we first review, classify and compare existing AOSE me...