A Methodological Proposal for Multiagent Systems Development Extending CommonKADS

The application of agent technology to real applications needs the development of a methodology which supports all the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) of an agent based system including its management. This paper proposes an extension of CommonKADS for tting the characteristics of the agent approach into the SDLC and the deenition of a new model, the coordination model, for describing the coordination protocols. 1 The need for a methodology In spite of the great interest in the agent technology in the scientiic community, and the introduction of terms such as Agent-Based Software Engineering (Wooldridge & Fisher, 1994) and Multi-Agent Systems engineering (M uller, 1992), there has been little work in deening a methodology for designing agents and agent based systems as A rst approach for the deenition of a general methodology for multiagent systems (MAS) is here presented, which has been developed because of the need to apply a multiagent platform to diierent applications. 2 The MAS-CommonKADS approach The deenition of a software engineering methodology does not usually begin from scratch, but is a reenement cycle, adding the new aspects and perspectives of the systems and languages and integrating the successful ingredients of previous methodologies. This is the approach followed here. Our methodology is called MAS-CommonKADS because it is an extension of the CommonKADS methodology, adding the aspects relevant to MAS. 2.1 CommonKADS overview CommonKADS (de Hoog et al., 1993) is a methodology designed for the development of knowledge based systems (KBS) analogous to methods of software engineering. The development of these methods has been ?