Comparing environments for developing software agents

In the last years, dozens of environments for modeling, testing and finally implementing multi-agent systems have been developed. Unfortunately, no standard criteria for understanding what kind of application profile a particular development environment is good for have been individuated yet, and the question 'How should I choose an existing environment which best suits the features and requirements of my application?' is still difficult to answer. This paper addresses this question, and aims at helping the multi-agent system developer to solve this problem. It provides a set of criteria for evaluating development environments, and then applies these criteria to five selected tools and multi-agent systems prototypes. Furthermore, some application-driven guidelines are described to help identifying the features of a suitable environment for developing an implementation of the given application. The features we identify can be used to find the right development framework among the frameworks we evaluate for doing the right application.