. This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusseswhat approacheshave been followed (mainly extending existing objectoriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey. 1 Introduction Agent technology has received a great deal of attention in the last few years and, as a result, the industry is beginning to get interested in using this technology to develop its own products. In spite of the different developed agent theories, languages, architectures and the successful agent-based applications, very little work for specifying (and applying) techniques to develop applications using agent technology has been done. The role of agent-oriented methodologies is to assist in all the phases of the life cycle of an agent-based application, including its management. This article reviews the current approaches to the development of an agent-oriented (AO) methodology. ...

There has recently been considerable international interest in the possibility of building second generation expert systems as groups of co-operating problem solvers. In this paper we relate our experiences with such a system. FELINE is a co-operating expert system composed of five autonomous intelligent agents. These agents co-operate through communication to identify the causes of anaemia in cats. The paper addresses three key issues: development methodologies for building co-operating expert systems, making expert systems co-operative, and inter-agent problem solving techniques. We propose a tentative development methodology for co-operating expert systems and describe how it was applied in FELINE. We also present a detailed, domain independent account of the inter-agent problem solving paradigm devised for use in FELINE. We conclude with a brief critical assessment of our work. 1 Introduction IN RECENT YEARS there has been considerable interest in the possibility of building compl...