To decide whether the increased overhead of a multi-agent system is necessary to solve the requirements, the problem should be analysed thoroughly and an informed decision should be made. For this purpose, a number of criteria have been defined. It is not necessary to answer all of the questions below with the answer that makes a MAS suitable, but if to many of them can be answered otherwise, the choice for a MAS must be made conciously and with potential drawbacks in mind.

To decide if implementing an adaptive MAS is useful at the global level, eight criteria are defined. The answers in brackets are the ones that indicate that a MAS is suitable.

The local level has to be examined to know whether some components require being recursively designed as adaptive multi-agent systems. Three criteria were defined to try and answer this question. The answers in brackets are the ones that indicate that a component can be a single agent instead of a MAS itself.

1. Does a component have a limited rationality only? (No)
2. Is the component “big” or not? Is it able to do many things, to reason? Or does it need simple abilities to perform its own task? (No, No,Yes)
3. May the behaviour of a component evolve? (No)

This content has been adapted from
Bernon, C., Gleizes, M. P., Migeon, F., & Serugendo, G. D. M. (2011). Engineering Self-organising Systems. In Self-organising Software, Natural Computing Series (pp. 283-312). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.