Empirical Evaluation of Guidelines for Prototyping Sociotechnical Systems in JADE Framework

One of the major problems of conceptual modelling is the lack of sufficient empirical evidence that evaluates the effectiveness of conceptual models in the development of sociotechnical systems. In this paper, we report the results of empirical study that investigates the effectiveness of adapting guidelines for prototyping conceptual models of sociotechnical systems in Java Agent Development (JADE) framework. These guidelines are divided into the JADE knowledge, -interaction and -behaviour prototyping guidelines. The empirical study involves developing 16 different sociotechnical prototypes with the JADE framework. Among them, 8 sociotechnical systems were developed using the JADE prototyping guidelines together with JADE website resources, while the remaining 8 sociotechnical systems where developed using JADE website resources alone. The evaluation results of the JADE prototyping guidelines ascertain that they are more effective for the development of agent knowledge of sociotechnical systems in JADE framework than the current practice of using JADE website resources alone. Moreover, the evaluation results of the JADE prototyping guidelines find out that conceptual objects of sociotechnical systems are necessary building blocks in developing JADE ontology. In the future work, we will conduct another empirical study with a large sample size of professionals that aims to increase the confidence in the results obtained from this empirical study.