General Guidelines for Design of Affective Multi-Agent Systems

The paper presents general guidelines for designing affective multi-agent systems (affective MASs). The guidelines aim at extending the existing agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies to enable them to design affective MASs. The reason why affective mechanisms need specific attention during the design is the fact that the way how both rational tasks and interactions are done differ based on the affective state of the agents. Thus, the paper extends the traditional design approaches with the design of affective mechanisms and includes them in the design of the system as a whole.