A Knowledge Level Software Engineering Methodology for Agent Oriented Programming

Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called Tropos, for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all the related mentalistic notions (for instance: beliefs, goals, actions and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from the first phases of early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a better analysis of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study.