Metrics for Agent-Based Software Development

In software engineering community an increasing effort has been put into design and development of multi-agent systems (MAS). However, agent system development is currently dominated by informal guidelines; heuristics and inspirations rather than formal principles and well defined engineering techniques. In this paper we define a set of objective and subjective metrics to measure the complexity of MAS. The subjective metrics is a modified version of function Point (FP) including the algorithmic complexity and knowledge complexity factor. The objective metrics is a measure for nearly-decomposability, measured by the communicative cohesion. Such metrics Can be used to select the best architecture for the MAS. A methodology for agent-based software development based on such metrics is proposed.