Designing and specifying mobility within the multiagent systems engineering methodology

Abstract

Recently, researchers have created many platforms and applications for mobile agents; however, current Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies have yet not fully integrated the unique properties of these mobile agents. This paper attempts to bridge the gap between current AOSE methodologies and mobile agent systems by incorporating mobility into the established Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology. We accomplished this by adding a move command to the MaSE analysis models and then defined the required transformations to incorporate the required functionality into the design. Finally, we translated the design models into Java-based agents that operate within a mobile agent environment.