1. Grupo de Agentes Software: Ingeniería y Aplicaciones http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es Jorge J. Gómez Sanz (jjgomez@sip.ucm.es) Dep. Sistemas Informáticos y Programación Facultad de Informática Universidad Complutense Madrid Development costs of MAS

2. grasia!http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es2 How much does creating a MAS cost? Though MAS are said to be an improvement over object oriented systems, the truth is that building a MAS is not easier than building an object oriented system Why?  At the end, in 90% of developments, we have an hybrid system: part object oriented and part declarative  double cost Software engineering measures: LoC, FP, OP Are these applicable to MAS? Experiences in team development

3. grasia!http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es3 Some numbers Projects we have been involved P907: 1 year, X LoC P815: 1 year, Y LoC PSI3: 2 years, Z LoC DEMOS: 2 years, Where has all my effort gone to? Transition from design to implementation Debugging Communication Scalability issues (concurrency management) Declarative parts: specially difficult

4. grasia!http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es4 Reasons why cost increases How much time does it take to train a person in MAS? MAS is a multidisciplinary area Lack of (engineering) training material Lack of development examples Once finished, what is the cost in adding functionality? Agents try to do little things or else doing many things Agents with little pieces of functionality: communication overload Agents with many functionalities: hard to build, that's why most developments use the other approach The importance of good engineering principles BDI was helpful for us Session Management Component based development

5. grasia!http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es5 How can we reduce costs? Not only better tools, also better processes Full flexible Development Enviroments Debugging Implementation Modelling (links with AOSE TFG) What is the path to follow: Automatic code generation from data models Most times, it is template based. Templates are built in within the development tool No support for data model extraction Integration of components Model Driven Architecture