Agent Oriented Software Engineering

The majority of existing virtual heritage applications are focused on detailed 3D reconstruction of historically significant sites and ancient artifacts. Recreating the way of life of ancient people is only considered by some researchers, who employ crowd simulation for this task. Existing crowd simulation algorithms are not suitable for modeling complex individual behaviors and role dependent agent interactions with other participants in the Virtual World. To address this problem we suggest treating 3D Virtual Worlds as Normative Multiagent Systems and propose the Virtual Institutions Methodology that can be used for design and deployment of Virtual Worlds that require complex interactions involving both humans and autonomous agents. To highlight the usefulness of this approach we illustrate how Virtual Institutions are employed in the development of the Uruk prototype, which integrates 3D Virtual Worlds and Artificial Intelligence in the domain of cultural heritage.

En este trabajo se presenta un modelo orientado a generalizar las interacciones que se realizan entre agentes y en particular se muestran ejemplos tomados del comercio, para lo cual se desarrolla el lenguaje de interacción entre agentes (LIA) y finalmente se describe la arquitectura del interprete de LIA incluyendo los módulos orientados al manejo de eventos inesperados y la comunicación entre agentes que manejan ontologías diferentes. Palabras Clave: Agentes, comparador de ontologías mixtas, espacio de interacción, inteligencia artificial, LIA, máquina de eventos inesperados, ontologías.

This paper proposes a formal modelling for Self-Organizing Multi-Agent Systems (SOMAS) based on stepwise refinements, with the Event-B language and the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA). This modelling allows to develop this kind of systems in a more structured manner. In addition, it enables to reason, in a rigorous way, about the correctness of the derived models both at the local level and the global level. Our work is illustrated by the foraging ants case study.

Many Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) methodologies incorporate a model-driven approach. Model Driven Engineering is based on three main ideas: models are the "first-class citizens", meta-models define modelling languages that are used to specify models and models are transformed during the development. However, model transformation is still a challenging issue in MAS. At first, MAS designers are not necessarily familiar with existing model transformation languages or tools. Secondly, existing tools for creating model transformations do not satisfy the necessities of agent-oriented software engineering, since they focused on coding with little support for developers. This paper proposes a tool for the creation of model transformations that is based on the generation of model transformations by-example. This tool overcomes the limitations of other similar tools in the sense that it can generate many-to-many transformation rules. The tool application is exemplified with two MAS methodologies, INGENIAS and ADELFE.

Gathering requirements in a domain problem is a challenging task for which several agent-oriented solutions have been devised. The high-level abstraction of agent concepts and their associated semantics eases this elicitation. Nevertheless, this does not ensure that the specification reflects what the customer demands. A frequent validation technique consists in building a prototype so that the customer can appreciate the result of the conversations with the analysts. The creation of such system requires time and money, and thus the industry would appreciate means of reducing these costs. This paper addresses this problem trying to prevent unnecessary developments. The proposal consists in capturing requirements with a framework based on the analysis of human societies named SCAT. This framework is generic enough to be domain independent and uses concepts similar to those in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. Specifications captured with SCAT are described at low cost, since only general principles are required, and get the extra advantages of being both executable and verifiable. Besides, the resulting instantiation of the framework can be translated later onto a specific methodology if the required transformation rules are developed.

Using meta-modeling techniques for defining the abstract syntax of MAS modeling languages(MLs) is a common practice today. This paper presents a framework for evaluating the abstract syntax of MLs. This framework is made of a set of metrics for measuring the metamodels. These metrics help in quantifying three features of the language: specificity, availability, and expressiveness. The specificity and availability metrics are focused on the measurement of the abstract syntax of the final ML products. On the other hand, the specificity metric is focused on the measurement of the abstract syntax of the MLs in its creation and evolution phases. The application of the specificity and availability metrics is exemplified with a study on five agent-oriented MLs. The application of the expressiveness metric is exemplified with the measurement of certain evolution phases of a particular agent-oriented ML. In conclusion, among other things, the presented evaluation framework can be used to compare agent-oriented meta-models and to evaluate the progress of an agent-oriented meta-model with time.

This paper outlines a first proposal of a formal semantics for the JADEL programming language. JADEL is an agent-oriented programming language based on JADE that has been recently proposed to ease the adoption of JADE, and to promote its use. In previous works, JADEL was specified at the syntax level, and only an informal semantics was given. The major contribution of this paper is to outline a formalization of the semantics of JADEL to complement previous works and to allow reasoning on JADEL agents and multi-agent systems. First, the paper provides a brief recall on JADEL by describing its main abstractions and their specific syntactic constructs. Then, a discussion of the proposed operational semantics based on transition systems is described. Finally, a detailed operational semantics of only some relevant constructs is given. The validity of the proposed approach is discussed in the conclusion of the paper, together with directions of future developments.

FIP A-compliant software environment to build agent systems. JADE offers an agent middleware to implement efficient FIPA2000 compliant multi-agent systems and supports their development through the availability of a predefined programmable agent model, an ontology development support, and a set of management and testing tools. This chapter describes JADE and its use in three international projects to develop applications in the fields of: corporate memory management, integration of fixed and mobile networks, and integration of Web services.

The world of engineering has changed greatly in the last decades. We witnessed that softwares have become omnipresent. Various domain engineering disciplines are now strongly supported by software tools. Moreover, the increasing complexity of systems leads to develop softwares where heterogeneous engineering domains have to collaborate within the same project. The paper describes a new concept of a generic multidisciplinary models composition tool that aims to address multidisciplinary development process. We illustrate the benefits of this approach using a development use case example inspired from the actuarial science.

The Multi-Agent Programming Contest, MAPC, is an annual event organized since 2005 out of Clausthal University of Technology. Its aim is to investigate the potential of using decentralized, autonomously acting intelligent agents, by providing a complex scenario to be solved in a competitive environment. For this we need suitable benchmarks where agent-based systems can shine. We present previous editions of the contest and also its current scenario and results from its use in the 2019 MAPC with a special focus on its suitability. We conclude with lessons learned over the years.

This paper is concerned with improving the software engineering of agent-based open systems. It critiques the existing Gaia methodology in the light of a motivating example of intelligent home networks. It describes the ROADMAP 1 methodology, which extends Gaia with four improvements -formal models of knowledge and the environment, role hierarchies, explicit representation of social structures and relationships, and incorporation of dynamic changes.

Software modeling environments are being used by experts in a variety of domains. However, there is no consistent approach to generically synthesize a product line of such modeling environments that also take into account the user interaction and experience adapted to the domain. The focus of my work is the proposal of a solution to explicitly model user interfaces and interaction of modeling environments so that they can be tailored to the habits and preferences of domain experts. We extend current model-driven engineering techniques that synthesize graphical modeling environments to also take interaction models into account. We formalize the semantics of the interaction models with the Statecharts formalism, which also serves as the underlying execution basis. This is done using a novel statechart refinement technique, to provide and promote reuse and semantic consistency.

Nowadays, the applications to be realized are more often distributed, complex and open, e.g., applications on the Internet: information search, brokerage, e-commerce, e-business… Therefore, designers cannot implement a global control and list all situations such systems have to be faced with. ADELFE 1 methodology was proposed to develop this kind of software. It is based on the AMAS theory (Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems) and the emergence concept. This theory gives local agent design criteria so as to enable the emergence of an organization within the system and thus, of the global function of the system. This paper focuses on three tools of the methodology associated with the process and the UML/AUML notations. The first tool is based on the commercial software OpenTool©, enriched to take into account adaptive multiagent system development. The second tool is a support decision tool to help designers to decide if the AMAS theory is relevant for the current system to design. The last tool is an interactive tool which supports the process and helps designers to follow the process and to execute associated tasks. The use of each tool is illustrated by ETTO (Emergent TimeTabling Organization) application.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) poses several challenges to the traditional theory and practice of software engineering with the emergence of a variety of theories and tools proposed to deal with this challenge. Agent frameworks with formal foundations have an important role to play in this scenario by allowing analysis based on a mathematical model. It is our contention that the available frameworks and languages do not fulfil all aspects of agent-based system analysis and development. We perform a survey of the available formal theories and tools for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and derive a strong motivation for a new formal framework to support AOSE. Several aspects of agent behaviour in this framework have been inspired by the popular Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model of cognitive agents. The new framework introduced concisely in the second half tackles the issues raised in the first half, including those regarding mobility, proactive behaviour, organisation and inter-agent communication.

For years the development of software artifacts was the sole domain of developers and project managers. However, experience has taught us that the users play a very important role in software development and construction. The inclusion of the Domain Experts directly in the development cycle is a very important characteristic of Domain-Specific Languages, as they have often an important role in making and constraining the domain of the language. DSLs are credited with increased productivity and ease of use, but this fact is hardly ever proven. Moreover, Usability tests are frequently only performed at the final stages of the project when changes have a significant impact on the budget. To help prevent this, in this paper we present a pattern language for evaluating the usability of DSLs. These patterns can help show how to use an iterative usability validation development strategy to produce DSLs that can achieve a high degree of Usability.

Context: The “Physics of Notations” (PoN) supports a systematic improvement of the cognitive effectiveness of visual modelling languages. Problem: PoN focuses on the concrete syntax of a language, building on a predefined abstract syntax. We should also consider the abstract syntax of a language when developing efforts to improve it by choosing the most adequate language constructs (concepts and their relationships). We instantiate this challenge by comparing two Multi-Agent Systems Domain Specific Languages: SEA_ML++ and DSML4MAS, and assessing the extent to which their respective constructs affect the developer experience. Method: We will perform a quasiexperiment for comparing how practitioners use both languages to solve similar modelling challenges. The experiment will have a cross-over within-subjects design and will focus on the extent to which the different language constructs impact on developer experience. These tasks will be monitored, so that we can assess their success ...

Context: The "Physics of Notations" (PoN) supports a systematic improvement of the cognitive effectiveness of visual modelling languages. Problem: PoN focuses on the concrete syntax of a language, building on a predefined abstract syntax. We should also consider the abstract syntax of a language when developing efforts to improve it by choosing the most adequate language constructs (concepts and their relationships). We instantiate this challenge by comparing two Multi-Agent Systems Domain Specific Languages: SEA_ML++ and DSML4MAS, and assessing the extent to which their respective constructs affect the developer experience. Method: We will perform a quasiexperiment for comparing how practitioners use both languages to solve similar modelling challenges. The experiment will have a cross-over within-subjects design and will focus on the extent to which the different language constructs impact on developer experience. These tasks will be monitored, so that we can assess their success and effort involved, including eye-tracking information. Results: This paper reports on the planned study design for this empirical comparison of two DSLs for MAS.

Software development required for constructing multi-agent systems (MAS) usually becomes challenging and time-consuming due to the properties of autonomy, distributedness, and openness of these systems in addition to the complicated nature of internal agent behaviors and agent interactions. To facilitate MAS development, the researchers propose various domainspecific modeling languages (DSMLs) by enriching MAS metamodels with a defined syntax and semantics. Although the descriptions of these languages are given in the related studies with the examples of their use, unfortunately, many are not evaluated in terms of either the usability (being hard to learn, understand and use) or the quality of the generated artifacts. Hence, in this paper, we introduce an evaluation framework, called AgentDSM-Eval, with its supporting tool which can be used to evaluate MAS DSMLs systematically according to various quantitative and qualitative aspects of agent software development. The empirical evaluation, presented by the AgentDSM-Eval framework, was successfully applied for one of the well-known MAS DSMLs. The assessment showed that both MAS domain coverage of DSMLs and the agent developers' adoption of modeling elements can be determined with this framework. Moreover, the tool's quantitative results can assess MAS DSML's performance on the development time and throughput. AgentDSM-Eval also enables the qualitative assessment of MAS DSML features according to novel quality characteristics and measures, which it defines specifically for the MAS domain.

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) can be regarded as User Interfaces (UIs) because they bridge the gap between the domain experts and the computation platforms. Usability of DSLs by domain experts is a key factor for their successful adoption. The few reports supporting improvement claims are persuasive, but mostly anecdotal. Systematic literature reviews show that evidences on the effects of the introduction of DSLs are actually very scarce. In particular, the evaluation of usability is often skipped, relaxed, or at least omitted from papers reporting the development of DSLs. The few exceptions mostly take place at the end of the development process, when fixing problems is already too expensive. A systematic approach, based on techniques for the experimental evaluation of UIs, should be used to assess suitability of new DSLs. This chapter presents a general experimental evaluation model, tailored for DSLs’ experimental evaluation, and instantiates it in several DSL’s evaluation exa...

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are claimed to bring important productivity improvements to developers, when compared to General-Purpose Languages (GPLs). The increased Usability is regarded as one of the key benefits of DSLs when compared to GPLs, and has an important impact on the achieved productivity of the DSL users. So, it is essential to build in good usability while developing the DSL. The purpose of this proposal is to contribute to the systematic activity of Software Language Engineering by focusing on the issue of the Usability evaluation of DSLs. Usability evaluation is often skipped, relaxed, or at least omitted from papers reporting development of DSLs. We argue that a systematic approach based on User Interface experimental validation techniques should be used to assess the impact of new DSLs. For that purpose, we propose to merge common Usability evaluation processes with the DSL development process. In order to provide reliable metrics and tools we should reuse and identify good practices that exist in Human-Computer Interaction community.

If software systems are to behave more intelligently, they will need to be able to adapt to the changing external world. The agent-oriented paradigm offers the potential to build adaptive systems. This paper explores the nature of adaptivity in multi-agent systems by exploring how to represent adaptivity in agent-oriented models. Rather than focussing on mechanisms for individual agents to be highly adaptive, we advocate regarding adaptivity as a quality goal of an overall multi-agent system. Discussing agentoriented models should help guide where design tradeoffs need to be made. Learning can be approached in a similar way to adaptivity, where learning is viewed as an attribute of the system rather than a fundamental property of individual agents. Examples are given from use of automated teller machines at mobile sites and intelligent information agents.

This research has been motivated by the lack of models and languages in the visual design field that are able to address design solutions, which continuously adapt in response to the dynamic changes both in the information itself and in the goals or intentions of the information recipient. This paper postulates a muhiagent model of dynamic design--a theoretical framework of design that provides a model with which the visual designer can think during the course of designing. The model employs a decentralized model of design as a premise, and borrows its conceptual model from the improvisational performance, such as dance and music, and bases its theoretical and technical framework on the field of multiagent systems. A design solution is considered an emergent behavior of a collection of active design agents, or performers, each of which is responsible for presenting a particular segment of information. The graphical behaviors of design agents are described by their dynamic activities--rather than by the traditional method of fixed attributes. The model is illustrated with two design projects, Dynamic News Display System and E-Mail Display, both of which were implemented using a multiagent design simulation system, perform, along with an agent description language, persona.

Agent-based computing can be con- sidered as a new general purpose paradigm for software development, which tends to radically influence the way a software system is conceived and developed, and which calls for new agent spe- cific software engineering approaches. This paper presents an architecture for distributed manufac- turing scheduling and follows Agent Oriented Soft- ware Engineering (AOSE) guidelines trough speci- fication defined by Ingenias methodology. This architecture is based on a Multi-Agent System (MAS) composed by a set of autonomous agents that cooperates in order to accomplish a good global solution.

The success of contract-based multiagent systems relies on agents complying with their commitments. When something goes wrong, the key to diagnosis lies within the commitments' mutual relations as well as their individual states. Accordingly, we explore how commitments are related through the three-agent commitment delegation operation. We then propose exception diagnosis based on such a relation.

Smart Roads (SRs) are systems that provide trafficrelated services, based on a combination of sensor and actuator networks deployed in roads, vehicles, and surrounding elements. They are complex distributed systems that involve multiple heterogeneous components and technologies. This makes their development a challenging and costly process. Simulations are a key tool to deal with these issues, as they allow developing and testing in fully controlled environments with simplified software components. Nevertheless, they still need to consider multiple perspectives (e.g. experts and designers), which frequently cause problems to understand and validate them. Model-Driven Engineering of simulations appears as a solution. It uses models to represent explicitly these perspectives, and transformations to link them and generate new artifacts (including code). This paper presents a framework to develop simulations of SRs following this approach. Its base is an existing modeling language relat...

This work gathers the experience of two different research groups that developed the agent-oriented methodologies INGENIAS and ADELFE. The particular features of the agent paradigm makes that the application of MDE approaches to it has to consider certain issues that are not common in mainstream Software Engineering. In particular, MAS methodologies usually consider several abstraction levels and perspectives, producing a richer modelling than for instance object-oriented approaches. Besides, the agent research is still object of important evolution with changing and growing conceptual frameworks. The view of these MAS research groups is promoting model transformations to bridge these gaps between perspectives in modelling, and to support the change in the modelling languages and their corresponding tools. This focus on transformations should also allow taking advantage of the semantic richness of MAS concepts in code generation, producing software that is closer to the final product since the meaning of the concept and its related behaviour are more precise.

Requirements elicitation for a software system is a key stage in a successful development. At the same time, it is one of the most challenging, because requirements have to consider the mutual influences between the envisioned system and the human context where it will work. These influences cover aspects such as organization, motivation, evolution, and cognition, taking place in a specific setting. The agent paradigm facilitates the analysis of these features because of its intentional and social nature. Nevertheless, determining the information that should be obtained and the way it should be modelled is not a trivial task. Developers are experts in software systems but not always familiarized with the concrete domain of those systems. The Requirements Elicitation Guide, a technique based on the Activity Theory from Social Sciences, can be applied to support developers in these issues. This guide empowers developers with the experience of social sciences in these studies. This paper introduces this guide and shows its application in a case study about a web application.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.

Complex Systems often exhibit hierarchical structures and multiple levels of abstraction, and MultiAgent Systems, even if they have proved their adequacy to model such systems, still remains in their larger part at one or two abstraction levels. It seems uncertain in this context that MAS will be able to catch efficiently the whole complexity of such systems. Holonic Multi-Agent Systems and their intrinsic hierarchical structure appears as a natural alternative. In this paper we propose a generic framework for HMAS modeling based upon an organizational approach. The means to model a compound holon using organizations and how to conciliate in a generic way the holonic structure with problem-dependent behaviors, are detailed. Different aspects related to the holon dynamics : holon creation, members integration and self-organization are also studied. 1 Roman god with two faces. Janus was the god of gates and doorways, custodian of the universe and god of beginnings

We tackle the problem of semantic heterogeneity in the context of agent communication and argue that solutions based solely on ontologies and ontology matching do not capture adequately the richness of semantics as it arises in dynamic and open multiagent systems. Current solutions to the semantic heterogeneity problem in distributed systems usually do not address the contextual nuances of the interaction underlying an agent communication. The meaning an agent attaches to its utterances is, in our view, very relative to the particular dialogue in which it may be engaged, and that the interaction model specifying its dialogical structure and its unfolding should not be left out of the semantic alignment mechanism. In this article we provide the formal foundation of a novel, interaction-based approach to semantic alignment, drawing from a mathematical construct inspired from category theory that we call the communication product. In addition, we describe a simple alignment protocol which, combined with a probabilistic matching mechanism, endows an agent with the capacity of bootstrapping -by repeated successful interaction-the basic semantic relationship between its local vocabulary and that of another agent. We have also implemented the alignment technique based on this approach and prove its viability by means of an abstract experimentation and a thorough statistical analysis.

espanolEl uso de herramientas para el desarrollo de software, forman parte importante para el analisis de requerimientos de proyectos de software, tanto en las empresas, asi como en la curricula del sector educativo a nivel licenciatura; una de las herramientas es el UML (Lenguaje Unificado de Modelado). Se realizo un estudio para evaluar, en que medida, tanto las empresas como las universidades utilizan estas herramientas; mediante el metodo estadistico x² (ji-cuadrada), lo que ayudara a identificar relaciones de dependencia entre variables cualitativas, cuyo calculo nos permitira afirmar con un nivel de confianza estadistico determinado si los niveles de las variables (uso, utilidad, ventajas, casos de uso, diagramas de secuencia, componentes y colaboracion) de las empresas y el sector educativo muestran casos de uso similares, los cuales serviran de apoyo en la toma de decisiones de contenido de la curricula de las carreras de informatica y sistemas computacionales.. EnglishThe u...

Agent-based systems are no longer contained within the boundaries of a single, small agent organization. To meet the demands of large-scale system implementations, agent organizations must deal with environmental forces, interact with other agent organizations, and know how they affect individual agents. In this paper, we look to social and organizational systems theory as a source of inspiration. Many of these techniques have been successful for a hundreds and thousands of years. We believe that the designers of agent-based systems can learn a great deal from organization designers. In the first of a series, this paper examines the notion of role and its implications on how agents might behave in group settings.

Without an environment, an agent is effectively useless. Cut off from the rest of its world, the agent can neither sense nor act. An environment provides the conditions under which an entity (agent or object) can exist. It defines the properties of the world in which an agent will function. Designing effective agents requires careful consideration of both the physical and communicational aspects of their environment. Two issues exists for understanding environments: 1. Every agent has an environment, no matter what the agent's philosophy or architecture is. 2. Being aware of the agent's environment enables its designer to get more powerful interaction via architecture-dependent means.

In this paper, we identify and analyse a set of characteristics that increasingly distinguish today's complex software systems from ‘‘traditional” ones. Several examples in different areas show that these characteristics are not limited to a few application domains but are widespread. Then, we discuss how these characteristics are likely to impact dramatically on the very way software systems are modelled and engineered. In particular, we appear to be on the edge of a radical shift of paradigm, which is about to change our very attitudes in software systems modelling and engineering.

Agent-based systems are no longer contained within the boundaries of a single, small agent organization. To meet the demands of large-scale system implementations, agent organizations must deal with environmental forces, interact with other agent organizations, and know how they affect individual agents. In this paper, we look to social and organizational systems theory as a source of inspiration. Many of these techniques have been successful for a hundreds and thousands of years. We believe that the designers of agent-based systems can learn a great deal from organization designers. This paper examines the notion of role and its implications on how agents might behave in group settings. * *

Discussions of agent interactions frequently characterize behavior as "Coherent," "collaborative," "cooperative," "competitive," or "coordinated." We propose a series of formal distinctions among these terms and several others. We argue that all of these are specializations of the more foundational category of "correlation," which can be measured by the joint information of a system. We also propose "congruence" as a category orthogonal to the others, reflecting the degree to which correlation and its specializations satisfy user requirements. Then we explore the degree to which lack of correlation can arise purposefully, and show the need to use formal stochasticity in cases where such lack of correlation is truly necessary (such as in stochastic search).

Collaborative communication mediated by computers concerns the development of applications that allow voice, text and exchange images, and is targeted for persons that employ digital media. This area has had a rapid growth with the proliferation of tools, such as wiki, blogs, discussion groups, shared screens, project organizers and video conferences that are supported in platforms such as Web, P2P or mobile devices. Communication quality partly depends on the design of users' inter-phases that are developed, on the achieved usability of the final product and on the sociability and socialization level practiced by groups. The central aspect to mediate communication among human beings is to make a high quality design, through the development of interaction patterns. This article considers that interaction patterns based upon communicational and usability characteristics offered by collaborative applications. As a result, a language derived from the Collaborative Communication pat...

A Dios, padre celestial siempre me guías y me cuidas… A mi mamá Sarita, por ser única comprensiva y afectuosa, que siempre está brindándome todo su amor y apoyo, dándome fuerzas para seguir adelante en todos los momentos de la vida, eres incondicional y se que siempre contaré contigo. Te Quiero Mucho. A mi papá José, ejemplo a seguir y que siempre imitaré, siempre estas guiándome y aconsejándome, me brindaste todo lo que sabes y tienes de la mejor forma posible, me enseñaste a ser como soy, me diste todo tu amor y cariño, siempre estarás a mi lado. Te Quiero Mucho. A mis hermanos José Luis y Santiago, por compartir conmigo a lo largo de mi vida familiar, académica y profesional, por ser mi apoyo y mi alegría, por estar siempre a mi lado apoyándome. Les Quiero Mucho. A mi esposa Katy, pilar fundamental en mi vida, cuyo amor, compañía y comprensión permitieron que nunca me derrumbe y siga hacia adelante. Te amo mucho y al fin podré decirte "Lo logré!".

This paper reports an analysis of near-optimal Blocks World planning. Various methods are clarified, and their time complexity is shown to be linear in the number of blocks, which improves their known complexity bounds. The speed of the implemented programs (ten thousand blocks are handled in a second) enables us to make empirical observations on large problems. These suggest that the above methods have very close average performance ratios, and yield a rough upper bound on those ratios well below the worst case of 2. F'urther, they lead to the conjecture that in the limit the simplest linear time algorithm could be just as good on average as the optimal one.

Software engineering development is crucial for industrial and commercial applications as systems are required to operate in increasingly complex, distributed, open, dynamic, unpredictable, and inherently highly interactive environments. This work is being motivated by the need to engineer complex systems with autonomous entities, to manage systems ’ inherent complexity during analysis, design and implementation. This article presents the Agent Role Locking (ARL) theory that provides a new conceptualization of the relation between agents and roles in Multi Agent Systems. ARL concepts are being explained and illustrated using an e-learning system case study. ARL extends UML with both static and dynamic structures by means of role class, agent class diagrams and Agent Interaction Protocol

Software engineering development is crucial for industrial and commercial applications as systems are required to operate in increasingly complex, distributed, open, dynamic, unpredictable, and inherently highly interactive environments. This work is being motivated by the need to engineer complex systems with autonomous entities, to manage systems' inherent complexity during analysis, design and implementation. This article presents the Agent Role Locking (ARL) theory that provides a new conceptualization of the relation between agents and roles in Multi Agent Systems. ARL concepts are being explained and illustrated using an e-learning system case study. ARL extends UML with both static and dynamic structures by means of role class, agent class diagrams and Agent Interaction Protocol (AIP) diagrams.

Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) is motivated by the need to develop software applications that perform in increasingly complex, distributed, open, dynamic and unpredictable environments. Two major fields of research that contribute to achievements towards AOSE are the software engineering and the agent-based computing fields. Even though there is no concrete relation between these two fields in the past years, research communities from software engineering and agent-based computing interact seeking an appropriate methodology and modelling technique for incorporating software agents into the software development process. This article classifies and evaluates the main approaches towards AOSE methodologies and modelling techniques. It aims to clarify different assumptions and attitudes concerning the modelling of agent-based systems and further establish a set of criteria for researchers and practitioners to evaluate existing and ongoing efforts.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are efficient solutions for commercial applications such as robotics, business commerce applications, information retrieval and search engines. In MAS, agents are usually designed with distribution of functionality and control. Lack of central control implies that the quality of service of MAS may be degraded because of possible unwanted behavior at runtime, commonly known as emergent behavior. Detecting and removing emergent behavior during the design phase of MAS will lead to huge savings in deployment costs of such systems. Effective and efficient design validation of MAS requires the development of systematic and automated methodologies to review MAS design documents. Although the increasing demand for MAS in the software industry has led to the development of several Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies, the AOSE methodologies usually do not fully cover monitoring and testing. In this paper, a technique to help MAS developers verify, test and monitor MAS design is introduced. This method uses MAS analysis and design artifacts created by the MaSE AOSE methodology. In this technique, design artifacts of MaSE are converted to scenario-based specification, which is very similar to UML's sequence diagrams. Then the specifications are used to analyze the system for validating the design of MAS and ensuring the lack of emergent behavior.

The increasing demand for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in the software industry has led to development of several Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies. The autonomous agents' interaction in a dynamic software environment can potentially lead to runtime behavioral failures such as deadlock. Therefore, the MAS environment should be tested and monitored against the unwanted emergent behaviors. The AOSE methodologies usually do not cover monitoring and testing. On the other hand model-based software development practices such as the Unified Modeling Languages (UML) are commonly used in practice and are equipped with a rich set of model based testing and monitoring tools. In this paper, we propose a conversion tool to help MAS engineers use UML-based monitoring and testing tools to test and monitor MAS design and analysis artifacts created by Multiagent Software Engineering (MaSE) as one of the most powerful and famous AOSE methodologies.

Project-Based Learning (PBL) has become a necessity for the Moroccan higher education reform. PBL is an approach that transforms teaching from "teachers telling" to "students doing". However, implementing PBLs brings new challenges to higher education. In this paper, we present a set of Technology-enhanced Learning environments integrating the needed aspects in a synergetic way to fit well PBLs, especially in our context of use. The collaborative environments we developed, called respectively Smart-Project, Moulinette, M@roc Téléformation and Multi Agent Reporting System (MARS), were used to support PBL in the process of reform. In response to the challenges, the synergetic way in which our developed environments collaborated to provide interactive tracking data and semantic reports plays, in our sense, an important role in structuring and supporting effective PBL sessions.

Software process modeling has undergone extensive changes in the last three decades, impacting process' structure, degree of control, degree of visualization, degree of automation and integration. This evolution resulted in a diversity of models that tended to suit software project requirements from different angles. This paper investigates the main streams of process models in an effort to build taxonomy of super classes of process models and their interrelationships. This investigation involved a literature survey of both existing process models and process modeling assessments. Based on this taxonomy an eight-step evaluation process was carried out. By utilizing a manual and an automated decision tables, a final assessment was presented. According to project management literature, a set of decision criteria was then established to facilitate tailorability among process models. The paper concludes with the optimized selection of process models most successful in meeting a variety of software projects requirements. It was also concluded that process diversity could be the rationale for integration rather than differentiation as to capture projects needs in adaptive and flexible combinations. Finally, several frameworks were presented to address similarities, differences, comparisons, and evolutionary aspects among software process models.

In this paper we show a tutoring system having a multiagent architecture. The kernel of the system is a rational agent , whose behavior is programmed in the agent logic programming language DyLOG. In the prototype that we implemented the planning capabilities of the language are exploited for dynamically building a web site, with the aim of helping the current student to define a study plan according to his needs, constraints, and competence.