DEVELOPING SOFTWARE AGENTS

In the last years, dozens of environments for modeling, test ing and finally implementing multi-agent systems have been developed. Unfortunatel y, no standard criteria for understanding what kind of application profile a particular development en vironment is good for have been individuated yet, and the question “How should I choose an existi ng environment which best suits the features and requirements of my application?” is still diffi cult to answer. This paper addresses this question, and aims at helping the multi-agent system develo per t solve this problem. It provides a set of criteria for evaluating development environments, and then applies these criteria to five selected tools an multi-agent systems prototypes. Furthermo re, s me application-driven guidelines are described to help identifying the features of a suitable env iro ment for developing an implementation of the given application. The features we identify can b e used to find the right development framework among the frameworks we evaluate for doing the rig ht application.