Evaluating a Model Driven Development Toolkit for Domain Experts to Modify Agent Based Systems

Jayatilleke, Gaya; Padgham, Lin; Winikoff, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-70945-9_12

Cited by 10 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…For instance, consider the TAOM4E framework [26] for Tropos, the PDT framework [56] for Prometheus, the agentTool III framework [31] for O-MAsE, etc. Some works like the CAFnE toolkit [39] also showed that a concrete and functional application could be completely designed by domain specialists.…”

Section: The Simulation Design Process For Multi-agent Based Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

IODA: an interaction-oriented approach for multi-agent based simulations

Kubera

Mathieu

Picault

2011

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) design methodologies and Integrated DevelopmentEnvironments exhibit many interesting properties that also support simulation design. Yet, in their current form, they are not appropriate enough to model Multi-Agent Based Simulations (MABS). Indeed, their design is focused on the functionalities to be achieved by the MAS and the allocation of these functionalities among software agents. In that context, the most important point of design is the organization of the agents and how they communicate with each other. On the opposite, MABS aim at studying emergent phenomena, the origin of which lies in the interactions between entities and their interaction with the environment. In that context, the interactions are not limited to exchanging messages but can also be fundamental physical interactions or any other actions involving simultaneously the environment and one or several agents. To deal with this issue, this paper presents the core notions of the Interaction-Oriented Design of Agent simulations (IODA) approach to simulation design. It includes a design methodology, a model, an architecture and also JEDI, a simple implementation of IODA concepts for reactive agents. First of all, our approach focuses on the design of an agent-independent specification of behaviors, called interactions. These interactions are not limited to the analysis phase of simulation: they are made concrete both in the model and at the implementation stage. In addition, no distinction is made between agents and objects: all entities of the simulation are agents. Owing to this principle, designing which interactions occur between agents, as well as how agents act, is achieved by means of an intuitive plugand-play process, where interaction abilities are distributed among the agents. Besides, the guidelines provided by IODA are not limited to the specification of the model as they help the designer from the very beginning towards a concrete implementation of the simulation.

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Section: The Simulation Design Process For Multi-agent Based Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

IODA: an interaction-oriented approach for multi-agent based simulations

Kubera

Mathieu

Picault

2011

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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“…Unfortunately, most of the model-driven MAS development efforts discussed in this paper do not include such an empirical evaluation of their approaches in their original work. Rare exceptions are MDD4SWAgents (Kardas et al ., 2009) and CAFnE (Jayatilleke et al ., 2007). Kardas et al .…”

Section: Model-driven Development Of Massmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evaluation results are also given in Jayatilleke et al . (2007). However, the adequacy of the evaluators is dubious when we consider the facts about the evaluation methodology (e.g.…”

Section: Model-driven Development Of Massmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Jayatilleke et al . (2007), the authors also provide a toolkit called CAFnE (Component Agent Framework for domain Experts) for their approach in order to make their approach consistent with MDD and use agent models to generate executable codes.

Figure 4An overview of the conceptual framework of domain independent components (adapted from Jayatilleke et al ., 2004)…”

Section: Model-driven Development Of Massmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Model-driven development of multiagent systems: a survey and evaluation

Kardaş

2013

The Knowledge Engineering Review

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To work in a higher abstraction level is of critical importance for the development of multiagent systems (MAS) since it is almost impossible to observe code-level details of such systems due to their internal complexity, distributedness and openness. As one of the promising software development approaches, model-driven development (MDD) aims to change the focus of software development from code to models. This paradigm shift, introduced by the MDD, may also provide the desired abstraction level during the development of MASs. For this reason, MDD of autonomous agents and MASs has been recognized and become one of the research topics in agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) area. Contributions are mainly based on the modeldriven architecture (MDA), which is the most famous and in-use realization of MDD. Within this direction, AOSE researchers define MAS metamodels in various abstraction levels and apply model transformations between the instances of these metamodels in order to provide rapid and efficient implementation of the MASs in various platforms. Reorganization of the existing MAS development methodologies to support model-driven agent development is another emerging research track. In this paper, we give a state of the art survey on above mentioned model-driven MAS development research activities and evaluate the introduced approaches according to five quality criteria we define on model-driven MAS engineering: (1) definition of a platform independent MAS metamodel, (2) model-to-model transformability, (3) model-to-code transformability, (4) support for multiple MAS platforms and finally (5) tool support for software modeling and code generation. Our evaluation has shown that the researchers contributed to the area by providing MDD processes in which design of the MASs are realized at a very high abstraction level and the software for these MASs are developed as a result of the application of a series of model transformations. However, most of the approaches are incapable of supporting multiple MAS environments due to the restricted specifications of their metamodels and model transformations. Also efficiency and practicability of the proposed methodologies are under debate since the amount and quality of the executable MAS components, gained automatically, appear to be not sufficient.

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“…They provide a toolkit for their approach in Ref. 64 in order to make their approach consistent with MDD and use agent models to generate executable codes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Model Driven Development of Semantic Web Enabled Multi-Agent Systems

Kardaş

Göknil

Dikenelli

et al. 2009

Int. J. Coop. Info. Syst.

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Semantic Web evolution brought a new vision into agent research. The interpretation of this second generation web will be realized by autonomous computational entities, called agents, to handle the semantic content on behalf of their human users. Surely, Semantic Web environment has specific architectural entities and a different semantic which must be considered to model a Multi-agent System (MAS) within this environment. Hence, in this study, we introduce a MAS development process which supports the Semantic Web environment. Our approach is based on Model Driven Development (MDD) which aims to change the focus of software development from code to models. We first define an architecture for Semantic Web enabled MASs and then provide a MAS metamodel which consists of the first class meta-entities derived from this architecture. We also define a model transformation process for MDD of such MASs. We present a complete transformation process in which the source and the target metamodels, entity mappings between models and the implementation of the transformation for two different real MAS frameworks by using a well-known model transformation language are all included. In addition to the model-to-model transformation, the implementation of the model-tocode transformation is given as the last step of the system development process. The evaluation of the proposed development process by considering its use within the scope of a real commercial software project is also discussed.

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Evaluating a Model Driven Development Toolkit for Domain Experts to Modify Agent Based Systems

Cited by 10 publications

References 9 publications

IODA: an interaction-oriented approach for multi-agent based simulations

IODA: an interaction-oriented approach for multi-agent based simulations

Model-driven development of multiagent systems: a survey and evaluation

Model Driven Development of Semantic Web Enabled Multi-Agent Systems

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