MASD: Towards a comprehensive multi-agent system development methodology

Abstract

In recent years multi-agent systems have gained a growing acceptance as a required technology to develop complex distributed systems. As result, there is a growing need for practical methodology for developing such systems. This paper presents a new Multi-Agent System Development (MASD) methodology, which has been developed over several years through analyzing and studying most of the existing agent-oriented ones. This methodology is constructed based on the strengths and weaknesses of existing methodologies. MASD aims to provide designers of agent-based systems with a set of methods and guidelines to allow them to control the construction process of complex systems. It enables software engineers to specify agent-based systems that would be implemented within an execution environment, for example Jadex platform. MASD differs from existing methodologies in that, it is a detailed and complete methodology for developing multi-agent systems. In this paper, we describe the process of the methodology illustrated by a running example namely a car rental system.