Heuristics for Designing and Evaluating Socio-technical Agent-Oriented Behaviour Models with Coloured Petri Nets

Software agents are a means to support socio-technical decentralised systems that increase the complexity of daily life. Designing multi-agent systems involves modelling methods for which it is currently not possible to check for soundness before a technical implementation. To improve the design process, the agent models require a mapping to a formalisation that is sufficiently expressive to represent equivalent model properties. The formalized presentation must cater for evaluating the model soundness, simulation and performance experimentation with different test data. The paper gives a set of mapping heuristics from agent models to a sufficiently expressive formalisation representation that follows a real life running case stemming from the healthcare domain.