On the evaluation of MAS development tools

Recently a great number of methods and frameworks to develop multiagent systems have appeared. Nowadays there is no established framework to evaluate environments to develop multiagent systems (MAS) and choosing between one framework or another is a difficult task. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a brief analysis of the state of the art in the evaluation of MAS engineering; (2) a complete list of criteria that helps in the evaluation of multiagent system development environments; (3) a quantitative evaluation technique; (4) an evaluation of the Ingenias methodology and its development environment using this evaluation framework.