An expressway from agent-oriented models to prototypes

Agent-oriented software engineering can be viewed as applying software engineering principles to agent-oriented development or applying agent-oriented principles to software engineering. In this paper, we are more concerned with the second view. We describe how prototype systems can be efficiently created from agent-oriented domain and design models. We propose a conceptual space that accommodates model transformations described by the Model-Driven Architecture. We explain agent-oriented domain models and platform-independent design models and show how the first can be mapped to the latter. We demonstrate how design models can be turned into the implementation of an agent-based prototype on a specific platform. The approach has potential for accelerating the process of rapid prototyping.