Early Performance Prediction of Co-Operative Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Performance is a persistent quality of any software systems. Software performance engineering (SPE) encompasses efforts to describe and improve performance of systems at the early stages of development of the system. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are composed of autonomous entities called agents which cooperates together to solve complex distributed problems. Whatever complex the system, the quality of the system is an important parameter to be addressed. We propose a methodology to predict the performance of agents in MAS by considering the importance of cooperative behavior of the agents. Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams and mathematical formulas are used to quantify the cooperation at early stages of MAS. Our methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study. The performance metrics are obtained by simulating the cooperative behavior of MAS using the tool Simulation of Multi-tier Queuing Applications (SMTQA).