Abstract. Many multi-agent systems development methodologies appeared and disappeared in recent years. This work presents a comparative study among four multi-agent systems development methodologies in order to identify gaps within these proposals that should be addressed for those who intend to apply them in a near future. The comparative study was based on the results of a controlled experiment divided into two trials. This paper summarizes the experiment results and raises interesting issues based on a multiple criteria evaluation table. 1.

A learning to coordinate paradigm was rst introduced in Formal Learning Theory by [MO99] using the tools of recursion theory. In this paper, we advance and discuss a rst-order paradigm of coordination|we call this paradigm of model-coordination. The paradigm is shown to extend Montagna and Osherson's paradigm of learning to coordinate, in the sense that Montagna and Osherson's binary players coordinate if and only if their rstorder equivalent agents model-coordinate. An important dierence between our paradigm and that proposed by [MO99] is that in our paradigm agents' preferences and beliefs can be modelled.

We are developing a methodology, called Tropos, for building agent-oriented software systems. The methodology covers five software development phases: early requirements analysis, late requirements analysis, architectural design, detailed design, and implementation. Throughout, the concepts offered by i* are used to model both the stakeholders in the system's environment, and the system itself. These concepts include actors, who can be (social) agents (organizational, human or software), positions or roles, goals, and social dependencies for defining the obligations of actors to other actors (called dependees and dependers respectively.) Dependencies may involve a goal, to be fulfilled by the dependee on behalf of the depender, a task to be carried out by the dependee, or a resource to be delivered. The paper presents a case study to illustrate the features and the strengths of the Tropos methodology.