Abstract
The Tropos project is developing concepts, tools and techniques for building agent-oriented software. This paper presents a quick overview of the project and then focuses on a specific problem: the identification of architectural styles for multi-agent systems (MAS). The proposed styles have been adopted from the literature on organization theory and strategic alliances. The styles are represented in i*, a framework designed to model social and intentional concepts. Each proposed style is evaluated with respect to a set of agent software qualities, such as predictability, adaptability and availability. The use of the styles is illustrated and contrasted with a software architecture for mobile robot reported in the literature.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
L. Bass, P. Clements, and R. Kazman. Software Architecture in Practice, Reading, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
J. Castro, M. Kolp, and J. Mylopoulos. “A Requirements-Driven Development Methodology”, In Proc. of the 13th Int. Conf. on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’01), Interlaken, Switzerland, June 2001, pp. 108–123.
L. K. Chung, B. A. Nixon, E. Yu and J. Mylopoulos. Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering, Kluwer Publishing, 2000.
Coburn, M., Jack Intelligent Agents: User Guide version 2.0, AOS Pty Ltd, 2000.
A. Dardenne, A. van Lamsweerde, and S. Fickas. “Goal—directed Requirements Acquisition”, Science of Computer Programming, 20, 1993, pp. 3–50.
J. Ferber and O. Gutknecht.“A meta-model for the analysis and design of organizations in multi-agent systems”. In Proc. of the 3rd Int. Conf. on Multi-Agent Systems, June, 1998.
M.S. Fox. “An organizational view of distributed systems”. In IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 11(1):70–80, January 1981.
A. Fuxman, P. Giorgini, M. Kolp, and J. Mylopoulos. “Information systems as social structures”. In Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Formal Ontologies for Information Systems (FOIS’01), Ogunquit, USA, October 2001.
E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson and J. Vlissides. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-oriented Software. Addison-Wesley, 1995.
D. Garlan and M. Shaw. “An Introduction to Software Architectures”, in Advances in Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, volume I, World Scientific, 1993.
P. Giorgini, A. Perini, J. Mylopoulos, F. Giunchiglia and P. Bresciani. “Agent-Oriented Software Development: A Case Study”. In Proc. of the 13th Int. Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering (SEKE01), Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 2001.
B. Gomes-Casseres. The alliance revolution: the new shape of business rivalry, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996.
H. Mintzberg. Structure in fives: designing effective organizations, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1992.
R. Motschnig-Pitrik. “The Semantics of PartsVersus Aggregates in Data/Knowledge Modeling”, In Proc. of the 5th Int. Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’93), Paris, June 1993, pp 352–372.
T.W. Malone. “Organizing Information Processing Systems: Parallels Between Human Organizations and Computer Systems”. In W. Zachry, S. Robertson and J. Black, eds. Cognition, Cooperation and Computation, Ablex, 1988.
J. Mylopoulos, A. Borgida, M. Jarke, M. Koubarakis. “Telos: Representing Knowledge About Information Systems” in ACM Trans. Info. Sys., 8 (4), Oct. 1990, pp. 325–362.
W. Richard Scott. Organizations: rational, natural, and open systems, Prentice Hall, 1998
Odell, J., Van Dyke Parunak, H. and Bauer, B., “Extending UML for Agents”, Proceedings of the Agent-Oriented Information System Workshop at the 17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 3–17, Austin, USA, July 2000.
R. Simmons, R. Goodwin, K. Haigh, S. Koenig, and J. O’Sullivan. “A modular architecture for office delivery robots”. In Proc. Of the 1st Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents (Agents’97), Marina del Rey. CA, Feb 1997, pp.245–252.
M. Shaw, R. DeLine, D. Klein, T. Ross, D. Young, and G. Zelesnik. “Abstractions for software architecture and tools to support them.” In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 21(4), pp. 314–335, 1995.
M. Shaw and D. Garlan. Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, Upper Saddle River, N.J., Prentice Hall, 1996.
O. Shehory. Architectural Properties of Multi-Agent Systems, Technical report CMU-RITR-98-28, Carnegie Mellon University, 1998.
S. G. Woods and M. Barbacci. Architectural Evaluation of Collaborative Agent-Based Systems. Technical Report, CMU/SEI-99-TR-025, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, 1999.
M.Y. Yoshino and U. Srinivasa Rangan. Strategic alliances: an entrepreneurial approach to globalization, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press, 1995.
E. Yu. Modelling Strategic Relationships for Process Reengineering, Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada, 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mylopoulos, J., Kolp, M., Giorgini, P. (2002). Agent-Oriented Software Development. In: Vlahavas, I.P., Spyropoulos, C.D. (eds) Methods and Applications of Artificial Intelligence. SETN 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2308. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46014-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46014-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43472-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46014-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive