Analysis and Design of Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS)

Analysis and design of information systems (IS) is the process of eliciting the system’s requirements and transforming them into a model that could be used to develop IS. Analysis and design of agent-oriented information systems (AOIS) relates to the very same process when it is applied to IS that are designed around the multi-agent paradigm. A comprehensive and rigorous methodology for developing multi-agent systems is lacking [Elammari and Lalonde 1999]. Most existing multi-agent systems were developed in an ad-hoc manner. In particular, systems developers paid little attention to requirements specification and to the analysis process [Treur 1999a]. On the other hand, analysis and design methodologies have been widely developed for software engineering. They provide a formal approach to specifying the systems requirements and describing the environment where the system is to be implemented (analysis phase) and defining the architecture of the future system (design phase). There is a wide agreement on the importance of developing agent-oriented analysis and design (A&D) methodologies [Burmeister 1996, Treur 1999a, Wooldridge, Jennings and Kinny 1999, Elammari and Lalonde 1999, Luck et. al 1997, Kendall et. al 1996a], and this task is one of the top priorities in the effort of turning agent-oriented software engineering into the prevailing software engineering (SE) paradigm. Given the advancement of software engineering methodologies, especially the object-oriented approaches, it is time that we update the techniques to deal appropriately with multi-agent systems. 1 Please do not quote or cite without the authors’ permission. Working paper 99-MIS-004, Faculty of