Evaluation of Agent—Oriented Software Methodologies - Examination of the Gap Between Modeling and Platform

摘要

More and more effort is made to provide methodologies for the development of agent-based systems. Awareness has grown that these are necessary to develop high quality agent systems. In recent years a number of proposals have been given. Based on our experiences we argue that a complete evaluation of methodologies cannot be done without considering target platforms, because the differences between available implementations are too fundamental to be ignored. In order to conduct a suitable comparison we present a flexible evaluation framework that takes platform specific criteria into account. Part of this framework is a procedure to derive relevant criteria from the evaluated platforms and methodologies. In combination with a set of platform dependent and independent criteria our framework allows evaluation of the appropriateness of methodologies with respect to platforms. As a consequence, also the suitability of methodologies for an individual platform, or vice versa of several platforms for an individual methodology can be examined. To show the usefulness of our proposal, we evaluate the suitability of different methodologies for an example platform.