A collection of method fragments automated with model transformations in agent-oriented modeling

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) Methodology Technical Committee recommends the method engineering approach for Multi-agent System (MAS) development. This approach consists in defining method fragments for agent-oriented software engineering, and then developers combine these fragments to define customized development processes. In this line of research, the contribution of this paper is a collection of novel method fragments that are assisted with model transformations, in order to allow engineers to better develop MASs in an automated way. Some of these fragments also include explicit advices for incorporating artificial intelligence in the development. In the experiments, two processes have been composed with these method fragments for two different agent-oriented methodologies (i.e. Ingenias and Adelfe). This paper shows how these processes are respectively used to develop two known MASs (i.e. Delphi MAS and Timetable MAS). Furthermore, the presented approach is evaluated with 24 developers that were randomly divided into two groups. Each developer designed a MAS satisfying the same common requirements. One group applied the current approach, while the other group did not. The results show that this approach reduces the 63.3% of the designing time in average forMASs.