Requirements for Multi-Agent Systems

Autonomous agents are beginning to be used as a software paradigm, because of their potential to build more powerful and flexible complex systems. To achieve such benefits a standard definition of is agenthood is necessary. In doing so, agent-oriented software engineering will not only be able to develop standardised processes for building agent-based systems but also be able to better as evaluate existing agent-oriented methodologies. This paper presents a set of requirements for agent-oriented systems and the relationships between them using the NFR framework. In order to exemplify the use of the defined criteria, we present a comparative study of two important agent-oriented methodologies.

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