In large software systems, the achievement of qualities such as performance, availability, security, and modifiability is dependent not only upon code-level practices (e.g., language choice, detailed design, algorithms, data structures, and testing), but also upon the overall software architecture. Quality attributes of large systems can be highly constrained by a system's software architecture. Thus, it is in our best interest to try to determine at the time a system's software architecture is specified whether the system will have the desired qualities. The Architecture Tradeoff Analysis MethodSM (ATAMSM) is an architecture evaluation technique. ATAM has been applied to a number of command and control, real-time, and information systems. As collaborative, autonomous agents become a significant software technology, the demand for evaluating the quality attributes of the architectures of agent-based systems will increase. Very broadly, agents may be thought of as software entities that have the ability to undertake action autonomously in their particular embedded environment, according to a typically general set of requests or desired goals, and that are able to communicate with other agents as determined by their own initiative. Given an agent-system architecture, we need scenarios that could be applicable for conducting ATAM evaluations on instances of that agent architecture. This white paper identifies a few features in agent-based systems that could be used to classify agent-system architectures and to guide the generation of scenarios applicable to these architectures.
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