SOURCE:

Faculty: Physical Sciences
Department: Computer Science

CONTRIBUTORS:

OMANKWU, O.C
Anigbogu, S.O

ABSTRACT:

Multi Agent Systems have proven to be a powerful new approach for designing and developing complex and distributed software systems. Developing multi-agent systems for complex and distributed systems entails a robust methodology to assist developers to develop such systems in appropriate way. In the last ten years, many Agent Oriented Methodologies have been proposed with some shortcomings that include lack of industrial suitability, lack of standard, research problem and the problems of traditional distributed systems as well as the difficulties that arise from flexibility requirements and sophisticated interactions. This dissertation is aimed at developing an Enhanced Software Engineering Methodology for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents. The objective include: Investigate three selected agent oriented methodologies (ROADMAP, MaSE and Prometheus);Present the enhanced framework for Development of Intelligent Agent; applying the enhanced model in development of Intelligent Agent called modeling agent as a proof of concept and conduct performance evaluation of the proposed model with the existing Software Engineering Methodologies. The methodology adopted for the development of this new System is System Development Life Cycle (SDLC).The proposed system developed combined the strong point of the previous existing methodologies – ROADMAP (Role Oriented Analysis and Design for Multi-Agent Programming), MaSE (Multi-Agent Oriented System Engineering) and Prometheus, and also based on three fundamental aspects: Concepts, Models, and Process. The new methodology covers the whole life cycle of agent system development, from requirement analysis, architecture design, and detailed design to implementation. The new methodology is illustrated by a case study on an Intelligent Agent-Based Travel system using HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL were the programming languages and database employed.