Making a strong business case for multiagent technology

In this paper, we describe lessons learned in commercializing and implementing agent-based systems in real-world business situations. Most notably we discuss gains in programmer productivity achieved by using AdaptivEnterprise, a commercial IDE and J2EE runtime engine based on BDI agents. In a wide range of complex business applications, we show that the use of BDI technology incorporated within an enterprise-level architecture can improve overall developer productivity by an average 350%. For java coding alone, the increase in productivity was over 500%. In competitive bids for large scale enterprise applications, AdaptivEnterprise was able to reduce total cost of ownership between two- and three-fold. In addition, the agent approach allowed the business to change and extend solutions quickly and helped bridge the gap between the business side and IT development.