Paper 4

A Comprehensive Approach for Designing Business-Intelligence Solutions with Multi-agent Systems in Distributed Environments

Authors: Karima Qayumi, Alex Norta

Volume 37 (2018)

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are an active research area of system engineering to deal with the complexity of distributed systems. Due to the complexity of business-intelligence (BI) generation in a distributed environment, the adaptation of such system is diverse due to integrated MAS and distributed data mining (DDM) technologies. Bringing these two frameworks together in the content of BI-systems poses challenges during the analysis, design, and test in the development life-cycle. The development processes of such complex systems demand a comprehensive methodology to systematically guide and support developers through the various stages of BI-system life-cycles. In the context of agent-based system engineering, several agent-oriented methodologies exist. Deploying the most suitable methodology is another challenge for developers. In this paper, we develop an exemplar of MAS-based BI-system called BI-MAS with comprehensive designing steps as a running case. For demonstrating the new approach, first we consider an evaluation process to find suitable agent-oriented methodologies. Second, we apply the selected methodologies in analyzing and designing concepts for BI-MAS life-cycles. Finally, we demonstrate a new approach of verification and validation processes for BI-MAS life-cycles.

Keywords: Business-intelligence (BI), Distributed data mining (DDM), Multi-agent system (MAS), Agent-oriented modeling (AOM).