Tools and Techniques in Agent Oriented Software Engineering Methodology

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) is rapidly emerging in response to urgent needs in both software engineering and agent-based computing. While these two disciplines co-existed without remarkable interaction until some years ago, today there is rich and fruitful interaction among them and various approaches are available that bring together techniques, concepts and ideas from both sides. In this paper I will discuss the conceptual foundation of agent oriented software development by relating the fundamental elements of the agent oriented view to those of other, well established programming paradigms, especially the object-oriented approach. In this paper we discuss especially the relation between object-oriented and agent-oriented methods is particularly interesting because they seem to be closely related.