Study On The Methodology Of Agent Oriented Software Engineering

This paper discusses and summarizes the key technologies, current status and developing trends of agent design and construction from both theory and practice views.The methodology of structure analysis and design or object-oriented analysis and design cannot adequately capture autonomy of an agent, the rich interaction between agents, the relationships that hold between agents in a multi-agent system and the complex structure of the multi-agent system. This paper discusses and summarizes the exist methodology of agent-oriented analysis and design, then propose an extended methodology based Gaia methodology.Agent oriented programming is a new programming paradigm and also a computing framework.This paper introduces an AOP language which is extended based on Object Pascal. Every agent type consists of Permissions, Responsibilities, Services, Actions and Service Process. Permissions are resources which an agent can access , and in Object Pascal Permissions are objects, for example, an database ,access to Internet and so on; Responsibilities are missions that an agent must accomplish. Actions are private method of an agent, and in Object Pascal, actions are functions or procedures . Service Process manage service quest that other agent propose. Base Agent type exists in Delphi as a component. Agents communicate each other through message, which is an XML document conforming to XML 1.0 standard.According to the characteristics of information retrieval systems for Internet application, this paper introduces the design and implementation of an Agent based information retrieval system. Especially, we discuss the system model and designs of its component. A base agent type is designed and other agent type is inherited from the base agent type. The Characteristics of agent oriented methodology are summarized: entity oriented, based on organization theory and so on.At last, this paper illustrates trends of agent technology and further work: coordination models, how to evaluate the ability of an agent and CASE tools for agent oriented methodology.