Towards a Full Life-cycle Methodology for Engineering Decentralised Multi-Agent Systems
Tom De Wolf, Tom Holvoet · Lirias · 2005
Abstract When designing decentralised multi-agent systems (MASs), a fundamental engineering issue is to achieve a macroscopic behaviour that meets the requirements and emerges only from the self-organising behaviour of locally interacting agents. Agent-oriented methodologies today are mainly focussed on engineering the microscopic issues, i.e. the agents, their rules, how they interact, etc, without explicit support for engineering the required macroscopic behaviour. As a consequence, the macroscopic behaviour is achieved in an ad-hoc manner. This paper proposes a way to define a full life-cycle methodology based on an industry-ready software engineering process, i.e. the Unified Process, which is customised to explicitly focus on engineering macroscopic behaviour of decentralised MASs. As such, the MAS paradigm is integrated into an existing and widely accepted methodology and we can systematically develop a solution that exhibits the required macroscopic behaviour. 1