An Overview of the Multiagent Systems Engineering Methodology

To solve complex problems, agents work cooperatively with other agents in heterogeneous environments. We are interested in coordinating the local behavior of individual agents to provide an appropriate system-level behavior. The use of intelligent agents provides an even greater amount of flexibility to the ability and configuration of the system itself. With these new intricacies, software development is becoming increasingly difficult. Therefore, it is critical that our processes for building the inherently complex distributed software that must run in this environment be adequate for the task. This paper introduces a methodology for designing these systems of interacting agents.