This paper addresses this question, and aims at helping the multi-agent system developer to solve this problem. It provides a set of criteria for evaluating development environments, and then applies these criteria to five selected tools and multi-agent systems prototypes. Furthermore, some application-driven guidelines are described to help identifying the features of a suitable environment for developing an implementation of the given application. The features we identify can be used to find the right development framework among the frameworks we evaluate for doing the right application

Introduction Telecommunication networks today usually exist in a large, heterogeneous environment. The network components feature different operating systems, platforms, communication languages, and vendors. These components may be incompatible and require a channel or link to facilitate cooperation and coordination within the networks. In addition to such multiplicity in telecommunication networks, we are witnessing a growing enterprise of data, in terms of both demand and supply. The importance and the need for data collection and the subsequent data distribution are becoming, more than ever, paramount. Interactions among networks or network components are inevitable due to the proliferation of data. This phenomenon has brought on a flood of various on-line activities such as advertisement, sale, research, information gathering, information passing, etc., which results in network traffic congestions and strains network management. Subsequently, this has demanded a better handling of

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The installation and configuration of a new network component is a difficult task due to the heterogeneous nature of today's telecommunication networks. This task requires substantial effort and extensive expertise on the part of the network administrator because he has to set hardware and software attributes for a variety of such components to make them work together. We propose a solution to this problem, i.e. to automate the installation and configuration process of new component using the plug-and-play concept. We have taken the idea of plug-and-play hardware from modern operating systems to plug-and-play network components in the Network Management domain. A plug-and-play network component is defined as a component that is capable of configuring both itself and other cooperating components in a network without human intervention. Several plug-and-play schemes are possible but we have implemented a scheme based on mobile agents. This paper describes the plug-and-play concept for ne...