A new perspective on agent-oriented software engineering

In this paper, we introduce and justify agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) as a layered technology. The layers of this technology are quality, agent-oriented software process model, agent-oriented methods, agent-based system architecture and agent development tools. On the basis of this layered view, an investigation and evaluation on the current! works in agent-oriented software engineering is presented. current gaps are analyzed and areas for further works are introduced. The other main contributions of this paper are introducing and describing umbrella activities for complementing the main activities and steps in the agent-based system development, a classification and definition of testing activities for agent-had systems and a classification of agent development tools. The results that have been presented in this paper are based on an extensive survey of work in the field of agent-oriented software engineering.