Architecture modeling and evaluation for design of agent-based system

As the Internet computing environment is expanded, service requests from users are increasing and systems become large and complex. To provide users with services efficiently, system must react flexibly to changing requests in distributed and mobile environments. Recently, software agent technology has been recognized as a solution technology to cope with this situation. Many researches are primarily related to system implementation or application by an ad hoc engineering approach. However, researches on the design of agent-based systems are not enough. This paper deals with architectural design of agent-based system. In detail, this paper identifies the possible architectural models of agent-based system, evaluates the identified architectural models using metrics and compares the architectural models based on evaluation results. Also, this paper applies the evaluation approach to real architectures of agent-based system. The proposed performance analysis activity can be included in agent-based systems engineering activity. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.