The complexity of agents, their environment, and the interaction between agents and environment suggest that experimental testing represents a major research effort in the area of multi-agent systems. However, the development of methods and tools supporting systematic experiments with agents has not found the expected attention. For testing agents, developers often resort to handcrafted solutio...

We present Taom4E, a tool for the development of software following the agent-oriented software engineering methodology Tropos. The Eclipse plug-in Taom4E supports visual goal modelling and includes functionalities for code generation and testing for goal-oriented agent platforms.

A great deal of researches in the area of agent-oriented software engineering focuses on proposing methodologies for agent systems, i.e., on identifying the guidelines to drive the various phases of agent-based software development and the abstractions to be exploited in these phases. However, very little attention has been paid so far to the engineering process subjacent the development activi...

One of the most prevalent approaches among distributed architectures is Multi-Agent Systems. The agents have characteristics such as autonomy, reasoning, reactivity, social abilities and pro-activity which make them appropriate for developing distributed systems based on highly dynamic scenarios. Nevertheless, the development of a multi-agent system can be an extensive and delicate process. Dur...

This article is concerned with the engineering of societal information systems where technical components of a system – software agents – support the social network around which the system is centered. We propose agent-oriented modeling as a suitable software engineering approach for developing open and adaptive societal information systems. The article first outlines the steps of the software ...

This paper provides a summary of software engineering process and its importance in open system industry. It describes the agent oriented software engineering development lifecycle. It also focuses on orientation of multi agent systems and on some representative agent oriented software engineering methodologies such as Gaia, ROADMAP, Tropos, and MaSE which are general purpose methodologies. The...

In recent years, the agent technology has evolved rapidly along with a growing number of agent architectures, theories and languages. Computer science and engineering communities considered agent technology as one of the most important and active area of research and development. Agent oriented software engineering has numerous applications in different areas such as information management, spa...

The use of intelligent agents is on the rise, fueled by the unprecedented growth in the Internet and web based applications. Consequently, agent-oriented software is becoming large and complex. To support a systematic development of such software, an agent-oriented software development methodology is necessary. This paper focuses on the modeling phase of agent-oriented software life cycle and, ...

In this paper we outline an aspect-oriented approach to support separation and modularization of crosscutting concerns in multi-agent systems. Aspects are used as abstractions to capture social patterns as concerns that crosscut software agents in multi-agent systems, whose separation and modularization are not taken into account in current agent-oriented software engineering. Social patterns a...