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Great book on agent systems development

10 Sep 2005 . tech . Comments #software agents #prometheus #autonomous systems

I’ve been reading this great book on developing software agent systsms. It’s called “Developing Intelligent Agent Systems: A practical guide”, and is written by Lin Padgham and Michael Winikoff of the RMIT university in Melbourne Australia.

This book details a methodology called Prometheus that organizes the design and development of agent systems. What strikes me is that this the elements of this methodology can easily be transferred to other types of software development, especially enterprise applications.

The starting point and central theme of the Prometheus methodology is to identify System goals from Scenarios, and then refining these goals into functions or capabilities. This is a simplified description, of course, but this maps to any fairly complex software development where you need to keep track of the overall functionality of the system in a structured form.

Apart from this, the book has a brilliant introduction to software agents, so it’s well worth a read for that alone.