Date of Award

5-2002

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Dr. Jo

Second Advisor

Dr. Thomas Wiggen

Third Advisor

Dr. Thomas O'Neil

Abstract

As computer software continues to grow increasingly complex with each passing year, researchers continue to try and develop means to simplify software development. In this thesis, we propose a BDI agent software development process as the next evolution in software development. The goal of this research is to develop a process, which can be used to enable the creation of agent-based systems.

This thesis strives to present a practical software development process, which is useful to today's software engineer, by building upon current agent research and proven software engineering practices. Our BDI agent software development process is a systematic process, which enables the decomposition of a system into agents. The Belief-Desire-Intention Model is a fundamental ingredient to our development process. We utilize BDI as a natural method for describing agents in our development process. Our software development process utilizes several forms of use cases, which are useful for defining the architecture of a system in our process. We have also leveraged many other existing software development tools such as CRC cards, patterns and the Unified Development Process. We have made modifications to many of these existing tools so they can be used for agent-based development. These are just some of the tools that provide valuable insight into the development of our BDI agent software development process.

In addition to describing our software development process, we will also provide a case study to clarify the description of our BDI agent software development process. Basically, our BDI agent software development process strives to model both the dynamic and static structure of the agents that make up the system. Once we have modeled the stmcture, which makes up the agents in the system the stmcture can then be created in software. lX

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