Computer Systems and Laungages

Purpose-The specification of business services (BS) is one of the key factors for success in service provision. Researchers and practitioners have identified a set of problems in BS specification, namely: communication problems between providers and buyers, inaccurate specifications and changes in requirements. These problems were identified in the software engineering (SE) field many years ago, resulting in the development of many techniques and tools to address them. Given the similarities between the two fields, the purpose of this paper is to identify the main lessons learned in SE and to propose how they can be adapted to the BS field. Design/methodology/approach-The paper takes the form of a literature study and presents a conceptual solution. Findings-To address communications problems and inaccuracies in BS specification, a formal requirements specification stage is required. Requirements should be set out in a well-structured written, definition, document which can be used at a subsequent stage for design of the service (the definition of the solution). A requirements document for BS is proposed based on BS literature and SE methods. This document is based on the approaches used in the SE field for improving communication and reducing inaccuracies and covers the information needed in the BS field for specifying a business service. Second, a life cycle approach is proposed based on SE practice. It is shown that different lifecycle sequences can be used depending on the degree of fluidity in the communication between buyer and provider, the complexity of the BS and the stability of their requirements, with a repetitive process where specification and design are revisited iteratively and/or incrementally often being the most appropriate. This approach helps to stabilise requirements and to avoid inaccuracies being made in the specification. Research limitations/implications-This paper is literature based. Although still untested empirically in the BS field, the recommended approach has been intensively proved in the SE field. Originality/value-Requirements specification is a necessary (monetary, time and resource) cost for successful BS provision. The BS industry must realise that requirements have to be set down in writing and agreed upon with customers before initiating the design of the service.

Abstract. Interaction has been proved one of the main sources of complexity in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and many researches are working on techniques to palliate it. Furthermore, Organization modelling techniques lies on representing the groups of agents which are related by some kind of interaction. Current UML approaches represent these relationships as a set of binary links usually represented as stereotyped UML associations not providing abstraction tools to manage the complexity derived from interactions. In this paper, we ...

We view an evolutionary system as being a software product line. The core architecture is the unchanging part of the system, and each version of the system may be viewed as a product from the product line. Each "product" may be described as the core architecture with some agent-based additions. The result is a multiagent system software product line. We describe an approach to such a Software Product Line-based approach using the MaC-MAS Agent-Oriented methodology. The approach scales to enterprise architectures as a multiagent system is an appropriate means of representing a changing enterprise architecture and the interaction between components in it. In addition, we reduce the gap between the enterprise architecture and the software architecture.

NASA is researching advanced technologies for future exploration missions using intelligent swarms of robotic vehicles. One of these missions is the Autonomous Nano Technology Swarm (ANTS) mission that will explore the asteroid belt using 1,000 cooperative autonomous spacecraft. From the engineering point of view, the complexity of this kind of systems is one of the main challenges that has to be overcame, since it makes the behavior of the swarm unpredictable. In NASA, many approaches are being explored towards this goal, mainly, a tailored software engineering approach for this kind of systems, called agent-oriented software engineering, and formal methods. In this paper, we report on the main advances we have done towards modelling, implementing, and testing NASA swarms-based concept missions.

The variability level of average-size Business Information Systems (BIS) is highly enough for making the design of this kind of systems a complex task. There is an approach called Process Family Engineering (PFE) that tries to ease the design of BIS using ideas from the Software Product Lines (SPL) field. Roughly speaking, they propose to, first, study the variability of the system without entering into details by means of building a variability model (called feature model), that is used later for building the business process. However, in PFE the process of deriving the business process from the feature model is performed manually. Authors use feature models with a different meaning that is commonly accepted in SPL. In this paper, we provide a rigorous description for the new meaning of feature models, and a mapping relationship that defines how to use the information in the FM for obtaining the basic structure of the business process. In addition, as a proof of concepts, we have implemented an MDD transformation that provides the expected results.

The field of Software Product Lines (SPL) emphasizes building a family of software products from which concrete products can be derived rapidly. This helps to reduce time-to-market, costs, etc., and can result in improved software quality and safety. Current Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies are concerned with developing a single Multiagent System. The main contribution of this paper is a proposal to developing the core architecture of a Multiagent Systems Product Line (MAS-PL), exemplifying our approach with reference to a concept NASA mission based on multiagent technology.

The main goal of business modeling is to understand organizations to provide software solutions with high added value. This is a task far from trivial, and becomes more complex when it is modeled not a single organization but several organizations that interact. The current proposals for business modeling efforts focus only on representing business processes, usually by individual organizations, leaving aside the organizational models and information critical for business managers. To fill this gap, we present an approach for business modeling in which we link business processes to goals and organizational models. We also provide mechanisms to maintain traceability among views and provide descriptions at several levels of abstraction.

Autonomic Computing, self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly being accepted as a means forward in designing reliable systems that both hide complexity from the user and control IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as Policy-Based Self-Management. We look at ways of achieving this, and in particular focus on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. We propose utilizing MaCMAS, an AOSE methodology, for specifying autonomic and autonomous properties of the system independently, and later, by means of composition of these specifications, guided by a policy specification, construct a specification for the policy and its subsequent deployment. We illustrate this by means of a case study based on a NASA concept mission, and describe future work on a support toolkit.

Interactions between subparts of a system have been recognized as the source of complexity in many fields ranging from physics, sociology, neurology, to software engineering. Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) was born under the promise of conquering complexity and enabling the development of more complex software. However, current AOSE approaches do not provide enough engineering tools to deal with the complexity derived from interactions. More mature fields such as economy or component-based software systems have recognized that interactions present a predominant role in the determination of the desired outcome providing mature background that can be applied to AOSE. AOSE may improve its ability to deal with complex systems by improving the tools applied to manage agent's interactions in the overall design of the system. In this paper, we justify this assessment and propose some principles to improve AOSE methodologies regarding complexity.

When the protocol of a complex Multi-Agent System (MAS) needs to be developed, the top-down approach emphasises to start with abstract descriptions that should be refined incrementally until we achieve the detail leve! necessary to implement it. Unfortunately, there exist a semantic gap in protocol description methodologies because most of them first identify which tasks have to be performed, and then use low leve! descriptions such as sequences of messages to detail them. In this paper, we propase an approach to bridge this gap. We model MAS protocols using severa! abstract views of the tasks to be performed, and provide a systematic method to simplify them. Tasks are represented by means of interactions that may be refined into lower-level inter actions with the techniques proposed in this paper (simpler interactions are easier to describe and implement using mes sage passing.) Unfortunately, deadlocks may appear due to protocol design mistakes or due to the refinement process. Thus, we also propose an algorithm to ensure that protocols are deadlock free.

The web seems to be the biggest existing information repository. The extraction of information from this repository has attracted the interest of many researchers, who have developed intelligent algorithms (wrappers) able to extract structured syntactic information automatically. In this article, we formalise a new solution in order to extract knowledge from today's non-semantic web. It is novel in that it associates semantics with the information extracted, which improves agent interoperability; furthermore, it achieves to delegate the knowledge extraction procedure to specialist agents, easing software development and promoting software reuse and maintainability.

When the protocol of a complex Multi-Agent System (MAS) needs to be developed, the top-down approach emphasises to start with abstract descriptions that should be refined incrementally until we achieve the detail level necessary to implement it. Unfortunately, there exist a semantic gap in interaction protocol methodologies because most of them first, identify which tasks has to be performed, and then use low level description such as sequences of messages to detail them. In this paper, we propose an approach to bridge this gap proposing a set of techniques that are integrated in a methodology called MaCMAS (Methodology for Analysing Complex Multiagent Systems). We model MAS protocols using several abstract views of the tasks to be performed, and provide a systematic method to reach message sequences descriptions from task descriptions. These tasks are represented by means of interactions that shall be refined systematically into lower-level interactions with the techniques proposed in this paper (simpler interactions are easier to describe and implement using message passing.) Unfortunately, deadlocks may appear due to protocol design mistakes or due to the refinement process that we present. Thus, we also propose an algorithm to ensure that protocols are deadlock free.

Systems such as adaptative and context-aware ones must adapt themselves to changing requirements at runtime. Modeling and implementing this kind of systems is a difficult operation. Software Product Lines (SPL) approach has already coped with modeling a set of software products that share a common base of features by means of feature models. We propose using feature models to model the potential states of a product in what it is called Dynamic SPL. The objective of this paper is generating a component architecture that supports the dynamics of products and which is easily inferred from a feature model. The resultant model performs an automated analysis of the feature model in real-time to correctly response to changes.

In this paper, we present a new framework to extract knowledge from today's non-semantic web. It associates semantics with the information extracted, which improves agent interoperability; it can also deal with changes to the structure of a web page, which improves adaptability; furthermore, it achieves to delegate the knowledge extraction procedure to specialist agents, easing software development and promoting software reuse and maintainability.

Considering the great number of agent-oriented methodologies that can be found in the literature, and the fact that each one defines its own concepts and system structure, one of the main challenges in agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) research is how to make these methodologies interoperable. By defining concepts used in a specific domain in a non-ambiguous way, meta-modelling may represent a step towards such interoperability. Consequently the main objective of the AOSE TFG (Technical Forum Group) is to establish a strategy for identifying a common meta-model that could be widely adopted by the AOSE community. This paper sums up the approach used by this TFG which consists of (i) studying and comparing the meta-models related to some existing methodologies (ADELFE, Gaia, INGENIAS, PASSI, RICA and Tropos) in order to find commonalities and (ii) giving a clear and basic definition for the core concepts used in multi-agent systems for relating and positioning them in a unifi...

The activities developed by a company (business processes) have to change frequently to adapt to the environment. The implementation of business processes should support these changes without any recoding. In this work, we provide with an approach for modelling and executing agile and adaptable business processes. Our approach is based on UML 2 separating choreography (stable interaction patterns) and orchestration (implementation of the evolving business process, also called workflows), allowing the transformation and execution of the models by means of a flexible SOA-based dynamic platform based on reference Petri nets.

Autonomic Computing (AC), self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly gaining momentum as the way forward in designing reliable systems that hide complexity and conquer IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as Policy-Based Self-Management. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach focuses on building models that can be transformed into code in an automatic manner. In this paper, we look at ways to implement Policy-Based Self-Management by means of models that can be converted to code using transformations that follow the MDA philosophy. We propose a set of UML-based models to specify autonomic and autonomous features along with the necessary procedures, based on modification and composition of models, to deploy a policy as an executing system.

Autonomic Computing (AC), self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly gaining momentum as the way forward in designing reliable systems that hide complexity and conquer IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as Policy-Based Self-Management. We look at ways to achieve this, and in particular focus on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. We propose utilizing an AOSE methodology for specifying autonomic and autonomous properties of the system independently, and later, by means of composition of these specifications, to construct a specification for the policy and its subsequent deployment.

On the one hand, the Software Product Lines (SPL) field is devoted to build a core architecture for a family of products from which concrete products can be derived rapidly by means of reuse. On the other hand, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a software engineering paradigms dedicated to build software applications composed of organizations of agents. Bringing AOSE to the industrial world may prettily benefit from SPL advantages. Using SPL philosophy, a company will be able to define a core MAS from which concrete products will be derived for each customer. This can reduce time-to-market, costs, etcetera. In this paper, we expose the similarities between AOSE and SPL concluding the viability of future research in Multi-Agent Systems Product Lines (MAS-PL).