SODA: Societies and Infrastructures in the Analysis and Design of Agent-based Systems

The notion of society should play a central role in agent-oriented software engineering as a first-class abstraction around which complex systems can be designed and built as multi-agent systems. We argue that an effective agent-oriented methodology should account for inter-agent aspects by providing engineers with specific abstractions and tools for the analysis and design of agent societies and agent environments.

In this paper, we outline the SODA agent-oriented methodology for the analysis and design of Internet-based systems. Based on the core notion of task, SODA promotes the separation of individual and social issues, and focuses on the social aspects of agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, SODA allows the agent environment to be explicitly modelled and mapped onto suitably-defined agent infrastructures.