Development Research Map

Tool Support

Methodologies and methods are the necessary technical foundation for building complex agent systems. Nevertheless additional practical support is needed to enable a developer to utilize the concepts from the methodology. Therefore a continuous tool-support considering all stages of the development is needed. The design artefacts created at one step should be refined and reused in the following steps and should lead in a natural way to a executable system specification. Tool support is necessary in different phases of the development process. In the modelling phase an analysis and design model of the problem domain should be produced. In the implementation phase the design model is extended to executable code that runs on a multi-agent platform. The multi-agent platforms decide on the transfer possibilities and dictate the MAS-internal and social architectures that can be used. For a smooth transition it is desirable to have the same bundle of concepts at the design and implementation level. To enable debugging of the system, tool suport is also neccessary at the testing level. The various design artefacts represent different views of the whole system and can be utilized to establish tools that emphasize varying MAS-aspects.