Monitoring a multi-agent system evolution through iterative development

Abstract

Iterative development is a well know project management technique which has notably been popularized in object-oriented development through the use of the Rational Unified Process. Such an approach is nevertheless always driven by milestones rules on requirements or design models while it could be applied onto the evolution of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) among the software project. We propose in this paper to define a MAS acting as a wrapper for COTS-based software development and to monitor its evolution through an iterative template. Rules are evaluated by project managers so that the MAS evolves on the bases of agents decisions with human monitoring. The paper formalizes some relevant concepts in the perspective of a component-based MAS development, it defines what happens at transaction level as well as a series of constraints to properly monitor the project evolution. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.