Metrics for agent-based software development

In software engineering community an increasing effort has been put into design and development of multiagent systems (MAS). However, agent system development is currently dominated by informal guidelines, heuristics and inspirations rather than formal principles and well defined engineering techniques. In this paper we define a set of objective and subjective metrics to measure the complexity of MAS. The subjective metrics is a modified version of function point (FP) including the algorithmic complexity and knowledge complexity factor. The objective metrics is a measure for nearly-decomposability, measured by the communicative cohesion. Such metrics can be used to select the best architecture for the MAS. A methodology for agent-based software development based on such metrics is proposed.