A metrics suite for evaluating agent-oriented architectures

The Multi-agent Systems (MASs) paradigm continues to consolidate itself as a new branch of software engineering. Traditional software engineering strongly recommends to apply metrics in software developments. However, several research groups of experts in agent-oriented software engineering agree that classical software metrics and object-oriented metrics cannot directly measure the quality of MAS architectures. For this reason, this work proposes a suite of metrics to measure certain quality attributes of MAS architectures, considering agents and their organization. Most of these metrics are inspired by object-oriented metrics but they are adapted to agent-oriented concepts. Proposed metrics are validated by the application to four problem domains and eight architectures. Keywords multi-agent systems, agent-oriented software engineering, architectures, metrics

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Iván García-Magariño, Massimo Cossentino, Valeria Seidita
• Keywords: Agent-oriented Software Engineering, Applied Computing, Object-oriented Metrics, SAC 2010, Software Engineering