A Universal Criteria Catalog for Evaluation of Heterogeneous Agent Development Artifacts
Lars Braubach, Alexander Pokahr, Winfried Lamersdorf · 2008
Abstract. The research discipline of multi-agent systems is character-ized by a high degree of heterogeneity. This heterogeneity leads to a vast amount of options (e.g. dierent architectures and languages) how to em-ploy agent technology but is also one major source of diculties for its adoption. People interested in using multi-agent systems depend on solid survey articles, which clarify and evaluate these dierent options and ex-plain in which situations which choices should be made. A survey should also propose viable classication means for helping readers to under-stand which development artifacts broadly exhibit similar properties. To date, in most cases multi-agent system surveys do without classications and only address one specic type of artifact such as agent languages or tools. Often, only the characteristics of the representatives are described without evaluating them. In this work a universal criteria catalog will be presented that has been dened abstractly enough for being usable for a wide variety of agent development artifacts. It will be shown how this abstract catalog can be further rened with respect to the chosen area of investigation. In addition to the catalog its general usage as part of a survey will be explained and a blueprint for survey conduction will be presented. To demonstrate its usefulness cutouts of extensive evaluations, performed in the areas of agent architectures, languages, methodologies, tools and platforms, will be presented. 1