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The goal-oriented design of agent systems: a refinement of Prometheus and its evaluation

The initial step of any software engineering methodology is to form requirements. Recently, a goal-oriented approach to requirements has been proposed and argued to be beneficial. Goals also play a key role in the implementation of proactive software agents. However, although some agent-oriented software engineering methodologies have incorporated (aspects of) goal-oriented requirements engineering and although they target agent platforms that provide goals as an implementation construct, none of the methodologies provide a goal-oriented design process. We present three modifications to the Prometheus methodology, which aim to make it more goal-oriented in its design phases: we introduce a goal coupling diagram as an adjunct to the existing data coupling diagram, we modify the temporal design artefacts to include goals and we introduce a number of goal-related consistency checks. Finally, we report on an experimental evaluation comparing the effectiveness of the original and refined methodologies.