Models and Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design

Agent-oriented techniques are likely to be the next significant breakthrough in software development process. They provide a uniform approach throughout the analysis, design and implementation phases in the development life cycle. Agent-oriented techniques are a natural extension to object-oriented techniques, but while there is a whole plethora of analysis and design methods in the objectoriented paradigm, very little work has been reported on design and analysis methods in the agent-oriented community. After surveying and examining a number of well-known object-oriented design and analysis methods, we argue that none of these methods, provide the adequate model for the design and analysis of multi-agent systems. Therefore, we propose a new agent-specific methodology that is based on and builds upon object-oriented methods. We identify three major models that need to be build during the development of multi-agent applications and describe the process of building these models.