Evaluating and Comparing some Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Methodologies

Along with the growing interest in agent applications, there has been an increasing number of agent-oriented software engineering methodologies proposed in recent years. These methodologies were developed and specially tailored to the characteristics of agents. The roles of these methodologies can provide methods, models, techniques, and tools so that the development of agent-based systems can be carried out in a formal and systematic way. The goal of this paper is to understand the relationship between five key agent-oriented methodologies: Gaia, MaSE, MESSAGE, Prometheus and Tropos. More specially, we evaluate and compare these five methodologies by performing a feature analysis, on them, which is carried out by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each participating methodology using an attribute-based evaluation framework. This evaluation framework addresses some areas of an agentoriented methodology: concepts, modeling language, process and pragmatics.