Evaluate and comparission between Software Engineering Methodologies of Agent Systems

摘要

Agent based systems software engineering is a new model in the field of software engineering. It provides new approaches for developing agent based systems. Numerous methodologies for agent based systems software engineering have been proposed. However, it is difficult to select a methodology for a specific project, and their application is still limited due to their lack of maturity and weakness for some of them. Evaluating and comparing their strengths and weaknesses is an important step towards developing better methodologies in the future, and help developers to select the most suitable methodology for project development. This research presents an evaluation and comparison of five agent based systems methodologies: Tropos, Gaia, Multi-agent Systems Engineering (MaSE), Multi Agent Systems Development (MASD) and Smart Multi Agent System (SmartMAS) methodology that is suggested by authors. The requirements of  an agent based E-Commerce system were studied and applied on the development phases for these five methodologies, and toward a formal study, the evaluation and comparison were performed based upon a framework which addresses four major criteria: concepts and properties, notations and modeling, development process, and pragmatics. The results shows that the proposed methodology is give (85%) percentage of covering these criteria for the systems that were developed by using this methodology; this concluded that the proposed methodology is better than other methodologies.