The question of designing best agents for a particular task still remains unanswered. Moreover, the design of a society of agents which is ideally suited for solving a complex problem requires the use of prescriptive tools for analyzing distributed agent systems. Traditionally, simulation has been used to analyze the performance of agent based systems under different operating conditions before they are implemented in the real world.
Simulation is, however, only a descriptive tool.
The computational expense of exhaustive testing of all operational scenarios may be significantly high, if at all possible. The difficulty in developing prescriptive analytical tools for agent based systems is due to the non-equilibrium conditions under which they operate, the difference in the information available to each agent for decision making and, more practically, the sheer size of some of the real world agent system applications. Several problem or goal decomposition techniques can be used to design individual agents. Although, the solutions generated by these systems may not be optimal, we can guarantee the quality of the solutions or the deviation from the theoretical optimal that can be achieved by such decomposition procedures. Several negotiation protocols also have been studied by researchers and their long range characteristics are known.