Improving comparative analysis for the evaluation of AOSE methodologies

Agent-oriented methodologies, as they have been proposed so far, mainly try to suggest a clean and disciplined approach to analyse, design and develop MASs by using specific methods and techniques. Moreover, different studies have been proposed for the evaluation of agent-oriented methodologies adopting specific types of evaluation and criteria. However, little effort has been devoted to the comparison among such different evaluations. Comparison techniques may help in finding out new information from the existing studies, consolidating the results from the available evaluations, and consequently, in obtaining greater reliability from the evaluation results and their acceptance. With the aim of improving the acceptability of agent-oriented methodologies evaluation in the agent community, among the existing comparative techniques, the paper proposes the profile analysis technique for comparing evaluations carried out by different authors (perhaps using different evaluation frameworks). To exemplify the proposal, we present the application of the profile analysis technique on a case study.