Integration of Aspects with i* Models

Support for aspectual modeling to Multiagent system architecture

“…Our ADL was conceived to allow derivation of architectural design from aspectual i* models [1], that also separates and composes crosscutting MAS goals.…”

“…In fact, several studies have identified crosscutting concerns at design level of MAS, such as control and distribution [4], design patterns [20], non-functional requirements (NFR) [3] and agent internal concerns [10]. Even in earlier phases of software development lifecycle, it is difficult to modularize certain system requirements by using traditional building blocks for requirements specification [1,18]. As a result, some investigation has been performed to use aspect-orientation [11] in several abstraction levels of software specification to address this problem [1,3,4,10,13,16,17,20,21].…”

“…Using AOSD to develop MAS encourages modular descriptions of such complex software by providing support for cleanly separating the system functionality from its crosscutting concerns. Our previous works proposed: (i) an aspect-oriented approach for MAS requirements specification [1]; (ii) an aspect-oriented modeling language for MAS detailed design [21], and; (iii) an aspect-oriented implementation of MAS [22] in the Tropos context.…”

Incorporating Modules into the i* Framework

“…Concerning the first point, a line of research [ 6] [ 7] proposes the use of aspects for modelling cross-cutting concerns. Although it is true that separation of concerns may help to structure the i* models, the proposal still does not include modules to support the basic concept of stepwise refinement.…”

“…Views are a powerful mechanism to extract information from models and in fact it is natural to think in this to make modular existing models. This is the idea followed in [ 6][ 7] to create aspects from existing i* models. But still the problem to build the model remains, and scalability is still an issue.…”