Artefacts in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

An artefact for MASs is an entity not driven by an inner goal (as agents are), but used by agents to achieve their own goals. In this paper, we assume agents and artefacts as first-class entities in MAS engineering, and claim that agent-oriented methodologies should exploit these two abstractions as the basic bricks for the whole engineering process. As a first testbed, we take the SODA agent-oriented methodology and draw a possible roadmap for its extension toward the notion of artefact.