As agent technology has matured with the deployment of a variety of applications, particularly in open and dynamic environments such as the web, several methodologies and tools have been proposed to support software engineers during the development process of such systems. This article takes an overall look at representative agent-oriented methodologies by considering how they support specific agent-related concepts. This serves to identify areas in which this technology has shown its potential to solve new problems, e.g., the ability to manage complexity with an organizational perspective, goal-driven modelling as a way to build robust behaviors for adaptive systems, or the definition of notation and mechanisms to implement high-level interactions and protocols between agents. In order to be fully applicable, the challenge today is the maturity of supporting tools, and new methods for validation and verification of multi-agent systems.

software agents, intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, agent-oriented software engineering, agent-oriented methodologies