A Formal Development and Validation Methodology Applied to Agent-Based Systems

This paper presents first a formal development methodology that enables a specifier to add complexity progressively into the system design, and to formally validate each step wrt client’s requirements. Second, the paper describes the application of this methodology to agent-based systems, as well as development guidelines that help the specifier during the development of such systems. System’s functionality, agent decomposition, agent interactions, actual communications means, are progressively considered. The methodology and the development guidelines are presented through an agent market place example.