Title: Method fragments for agent design methodologies: from standardisation to research

Authors: Massimo Cossentino, Salvatore Gaglio, Alfredo Garro, Valeria Seidita

Addresses: Universite de Technologie de Belfort Montbeliard, Laboratoire Systemes et Transports, 90010 Belfort Cedex, France; Italian National Research Council ICAR Institute Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy. ' DINFO – University of Palermo, ICAR – Italian National Research Council, Viale delle Scienze, Building 6, 90128 Palermo, Italy. ' Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica (DEIS) Universita della Calabria, Via P. Bucci 41C, 87036, Arcavacata di Rende (CS), Italy. ' DINFO – University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Building 6, 0128 Palermo, Italy

Abstract: The method engineering paradigm enables designers to reuse portions of design processes (called method fragments or chunks in literature) to build processes that are expressly tailored for realising a system that is specific for some problem or development context. This paper initially reports on the standardisation attempt carried out by the FIPA Methodology Technical Committee (TC) and then presents the research activities we did starting from that work; these resulted in a slightly different definition of some of the most important elements of the approach in order to support a multiview representation of the fragment (the views are process, reuse, storing and implementation). The paper also describes the documents we used for representing a fragment and concludes with an example.

Keywords: software engineering process; methodologies; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-oriented software engineering; agents; agent-based systems; agent design; design reuse.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOSE.2007.013266

International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2007 Vol.1 No.1, pp.91 - 121

Published online: 18 Apr 2007 *

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