Article

Improving the architectural design of multi-agent systems: the tropos case

Authors:

Jaelson Castro,

Patrícia Tedesco,

John MylopoulosAuthors Info & Claims

SELMAS '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems

Pages 107 - 113

https://doi.org/10.1145/1138063.1138083

Published: 22 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Agents provide developers with a flexible way of structuring systems around autonomous, communicative elements. In order to support the efficient development of such systems, design techniques need to be introduced. In this context, we propose a set of UML-based diagrams which can be used to capture structural and behavioral features of the Belief-Desire-Intention agent model. The approach aims at supporting detailed architectural design of multi-agent systems by providing a process to guide the description of agent roles according to the proposed diagrams in the context of the Tropos framework. To illustrate the approach we present a Conference Management System case study.

References

[1]

Braubach, L., Pokahr, A. and Lamersdorf, W. Jadex: A Short Overview, In Main Conference Net.ObjectDays 2004, AgentExpo.

[2]

Castro, J. Kolp, M., Mylopoulos, J. Towards Requirements-Driven Information Systems Engineering: The Tropos Project. Information Systems Journal. Volume 27. Elsevier, 2002, 365--89.

Digital Library

[3]

Castro, J. F. B., Silva, C. T. L. L., Mylopoulos, J. Detailing Architectural Design in the Tropos Methodology. In 15Th CAiSE (CAiSE'03), Klagenfurt/Velden, Austria, 2003.

[4]

FIPA. FIPA (The Foundation for intelligent agents), Available: http://www.fipa.org, 2004.

[5]

Giorgini, P., Kolp, M., Mylopoulos, J. and Castro, J. Tropos: A Requirements-Driven Methodology for Agent-Oriented Software, Book Chapter in Agent-Oriented Methodologies. ed.: Idea Group, 2005, 20--45.

[6]

Kolp, M., Giorgini, P., Mylopoulos, J. Information Systems Development through Social Structures. In 14th Int. Conf. on Soft. Eng. and Knowledge Eng. (SEKE), Ischia, Italy, 2002.

Digital Library

[7]

Minsky, N and Muarata, T. On Manageability and Robustness of Open Multi-Agent Systems In Computer Security, Dependability, and Assurance, Lucena, C. et al. editors; LNCS, No. 2940, Springer-Verlag, 2004, 189--206.

[8]

Mouratidis, H., Faulkner, S., Kolp, M., Giorgini, P. A Secure Architectural Description Language for Agent Systems. In 4th AAMAS (AAMAS'05), Uthrecht, The Netherlands, 2005.

Digital Library

[9]

Odell, J., Parunak, H. V. D, Bauer, B. Extending UML for agents. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems at the 17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Austin, USA. iCue Publishing, 2000, 3--17.

[10]

Rao, A. S. and Georgeff, M. P. BDI agents: from theory to practice, Technical Note 56, Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, 1995.

[11]

Selic, B., Rumbaugh, J. Using UML for Modeling Complex Real - Time Systems. Rational Whitepaper, www.rational.com, March 1998.

[12]

Silva, V. et al. Taming Agents and Objects in Software Engineering, In Proceedings of SELMAS, Garcia, A. et al. Eds., LNCS, Spring, 2003.

Digital Library

[13]

Silva, C. T. L. L., Tedesco, P. C, Castro, J. B. F., Pinto, R. C. C. Comparing Agent-Oriented Methodologies Using a NFR Approach. In Proceedings of SELMAS, 2004.

[14]

Silva, V., Lucena, C. From a Conceptual Framework for Agents and Objects to a Multi-Agent System Modeling Language, In Sycara, K., Wooldridge, M. (Eds.), Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, volume 9, issue 1-2, 2004, 145--189.

Digital Library

[15]

Silva, C. T. L. L., Castro, J., Tedesco, P. and Silva, I.: Describing Agent-Oriented Design Patterns in Tropos. In 19th SBES (SBES'05), Minas Gerais, Brazil, 2005, 10--25.

[16]

Silva, V. T., Noya, R. C., Lucena, C. J. P. Using the UML 2.0 activity diagram to model agent plans and actions. In 4th AAMAS (AAMAS'05), The Netherlands, 2005, 594--600.

Digital Library

[17]

Silva, C., Castro, J., Alencar, F. and Ramos, R. Extending UML to Support Both Agency and Organizational Architectural Features. In IX Iberoamericano de Ingeniería de Requisitos y Ambientes de Soft. (IDEAS'06) (to appear).

[18]

Unified Modeling Language (UML) Specification: Infrastructure Version 2.0, August 2005. www.omg.org/docs/formal/05-07-04.pdf.

[19]

Wooldridge, M. An Introduction to Multiagent Systems. England, 2002, 15--103.

Digital Library

[20]

Yu, E. Modelling Strategic Relationships for Process Reengineering. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada, 1995.

Digital Library

[21]

Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N. R. and Wooldridge, M. Developing Multiagent Systems: the Gaia Methodology. ACM Trans on Software Engineering and Methodology, 12, 3 (2003) 317--370.

Digital Library

Cited By

Hosni ABedor HHassanin W(2018)Applying Tropos for Web-Based Multi-Agent eBookstore2018 International Conference on Computing Sciences and Engineering (ICCSE)10.1109/ICCSE1.2018.8374205(1-6)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE1.2018.8374205
Chareton CBrunel JChemouil D(2011)A formal treatment of agents, goals and operations using alternating-time temporal logicProceedings of the 14th Brazilian conference on Formal Methods: foundations and Applications10.1007/978-3-642-25032-3_13(188-203)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-25032-3_13
Lo SWang LKeh HLin Y(2010)A novel strategy approach for agent-based resource management systemWSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications10.5555/1852534.18525397:5(651-660)Online publication date: 1-May-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1852534.1852539
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Improving the architectural design of multi-agent systems: the tropos case
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. System description languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Software architectures

Recommendations

Improving Multi-Agent Architectural Design
Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems V

Agents provide developers with a flexible way to structure systems around autonomous, communicating elements. To support the efficient development of such systems, design techniques need to be introduced. In this context, we propose an extension of the ...
Design of Multi-Agent Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Design of Multi-Agent Based Intelligent Tutoring SystemsResearch of two fields, namely agent oriented software engineering and intelligent tutoring systems, have to be taken into consideration, during the design of multi-agent based intelligent tutoring ...
Designing multi-agent systems: a framework and application

The era of distributed software environments is emerging and research on multi-agent systems (MAS), which tries to solve complex problems using entities called agents, is on the rise. This paper proposes an architecture-centric method for developing MAS ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SELMAS '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems

May 2006

117 pages

ISBN:1595933956

DOI:10.1145/1138063

Conference Chairs:
Ricardo Choren
Military Institute of Engineering, Brazi)
,
Alessandro Garcia
Lancaster University, UK
,
Holger Giese
University of Paderborn, Germany
,
Ho-fung Leung
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
,
Carlos Lucena
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
,
Alexander Romanovsky
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 May 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ICSE06

Sponsor:

ICSE06: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 22 - 23, 2006

Shanghai, China

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
593
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Hosni ABedor HHassanin W(2018)Applying Tropos for Web-Based Multi-Agent eBookstore2018 International Conference on Computing Sciences and Engineering (ICCSE)10.1109/ICCSE1.2018.8374205(1-6)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE1.2018.8374205
Chareton CBrunel JChemouil D(2011)A formal treatment of agents, goals and operations using alternating-time temporal logicProceedings of the 14th Brazilian conference on Formal Methods: foundations and Applications10.1007/978-3-642-25032-3_13(188-203)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-25032-3_13
Lo SWang LKeh HLin Y(2010)A novel strategy approach for agent-based resource management systemWSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications10.5555/1852534.18525397:5(651-660)Online publication date: 1-May-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1852534.1852539
Silva CCastro JTedesco PAraújo JMoreira AMylopoulos J(2007)Improving Multi-Agent Architectural DesignSoftware Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems V10.1007/978-3-540-73131-3_10(165-184)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-540-73131-3_10

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten