Supporting autonomy in agent oriented methodologies

Designing a software solution for a complex systems is always a demanding task, it becomes much more complex if we consider to design a multi agent system where agents have to exhibit autonomy; which abstractions and which concepts to take into consideration when using a design methodology we would like to support autonomy? In this paper, we answer this question by studying and analyzing literature on the concept of agents in order to establish the basic set of concepts an agent oriented methodology has to deal with.