Structured Evaluation Framework Of Agent-Oriented CASE Environment And Modeling Methodology For Organizational Structure Of Multi-Agent System

Agent-Oriented Computing (AOC) offers a promising software engineering approach for developing complex applications. However, there are two primary technical impediments to the widespread adoption of agent technology: First, the lack of effective methodologies enabling developers to clearly specify and design their applications as multi-agent systems; Second, the lack of widely available industrial-strength agent-oriented CASE environments.Against this background, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, in the literature of agent technology, it has become an open issue to evaluate various agent-oriented CASE environments in order to help the developers select the proper and effective agent-oriented CASE environment for developing various applications, and promote the standardization and integration of agent-oriented CASE environments. A structured evaluation framework (SEF) is presented in this paper, which has such characteristics as multi-perspective, easy-to-use, extension and independence of application. Based on the SEF, a number of agent-oriented CASE environments are selected and evaluated, and some important evaluation results are analyzed in detail. Second, although organization abstraction has become more and more important in the analysis and design of multi-agent system, few research efforts have aimed at how to model organizational structure of multi-agent system. This paper proposed a novel modeling language called OrgS and an agent-oriented development methodology called Gaia2S which extends Gaia for modeling organizational structure of multi-agent system. A modeling tool called OrgTool was developed to support OrgS. An information system example is also illustrated to show how to use OrgS and Gaia2S to anayse and model multi-agent system.