Home   Programme

 

Contributions

FIPA Proposal for a Design Process Documentation and Fragmentation Working Group

Several design processes supporting analysis, design and implementation of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been to date proposed in the context of Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE).
Each of them presents different advantages when applied to specific problems. A unique design process cannot be general enough to be useful to everyone without some kind of customization; when developing a new design process, several MAS developers/designers prefer to use phases or models or elements coming from existing design processes in order to build up a personalized approach for their own problem thus spending time and increasing the cost for learning different approaches
This problem can be faced by adopting the method engineering paradigm (more precisely the situational method engineering paradigm). Situational method engineering paradigm provides means for constructing ad-hoc software engineering process following an approach based on the reuse of portion of existing design processes, the so called method fragments stored in a repository, called method base.
Method fragment or simply fragment is the building block of ad-hoc design processes; several well known approaches in literature present different definitions and descriptions of method fragment but all of them share the same assumption: each existing design process can be considered as composed of self contained components, the fragments. The definition of method fragment in every kind of situational method engineering approach constitutes the base for the extraction of fragments from existing design processes, for their retrieval from the method base and for their assembly in the new design process. Today it does not exist (yet) a unique, standard, definition of method fragment besides when looking at existing design processes, usually designers have to cope with an additional difficulty consisting in the lack of uniformity in their documentation.
We think that in the FIPA context, the adoption of a standardized way for representing design aimed at developing multi-agent systems is very advisable. This would facilitate the comparison of different processes, their evaluation and an easier transition to the next step of our proposal: the fragmentation of such processes in a set of fragments that abiding to the same structure. The definition of a standard way for documenting design processes and the definition of a standard structure of the fragments that compose these processes are therefore the aims of this working group.

Objective of the proposal
This working group will propose a definition of method fragment to be used during a situational method engineering process, the fundamental elements it is composed of and the metamodel it is based on.
The first step will be the identification of the most suitable process metamodel language for the representation of the existing design processes from which the fragment have to be extracted and for their own representation in a way that could emphasize their fundamental elements useful for the retrieval from the method base and for their assembly. An important contribution about that might come from an OMG specification, the Software Process Engineering Metamodel 2.0 (SPEM). This could be the natural candidate to be the meta-model adopted for describing FIPA processes since it has been already an accepted standard.
The second step will consist in the definition of a proper template for the description of agent-oriented design processes. Such a template will, obviously, refer to the selected process metamodel and suggest the adoption of good practices in documenting existing processes as well defining new ones.
The third step will be the definition of the method fragment structure and its documentation template. This work will start from the results obtained from the FIPA Methodology Technical Committee (years 2003-2005).
The fragmentation of some existing design processes will be performed with the aim of defining guidelines and practices for processes fragmentation according to the specification provided in the Method Fragment Structure and Description Template.

The proposed work aims at providing the possibility of representing design processes and method fragments through the use of a standardized structure thus allowing the creation of sharable repositories (method bases) and enabling an easier composition of new design processes.
In the future this standardized way of representing method fragment could be used for the implementation of fragments in a CAPE (Computer Aided Process Engineering) tool supporting the designer during the construction phases.


Other standards in the field
Another specification (ISO/IEC FDIS 24744) covers similar issues, please contact B. Henderson-Sellers for further info on that or subscribe to the AOSE TFG mailing list (contact AOSE-TFG08 chairs for instructions).


The work to be done during the AOSE-TFG08
During this TFG we aim at discussing the proposal and finalizing that in order to submit the resulting document to the FIPA board soon after the meeting.



Proposal draft download (30-Oct-2008)


 

Working Documents, Papers, Links

15-12-08: E.Argente, V. Botti, V. Inglada. GORMAS: Guidelines for ORganizational open MAS. presentation (pdf).

15-12-08: K. Taveter, L. Sterling. Features as Loosely Defined Method Fragments. pdf.

13-12-08: V. Seidita, M. Cossentino, V. Hilaire, N. Gaud, S. Galland, A. Koukam, S. Gaglio. The Metamodel: a Starting Point for Design Processes Construction. pdf.

13-12-08: E. Argente, V. Julian, and V. Botti. MAS Modelling based on Organizations. pdf

10-12-08: list of papers discussing/adopting/referring to the old FIPA Methodology TC Fragment specification proposal. doc 

10-12-08: Answer from B. Henderson-Seller to paper from Spanoudakis and Moraitis: answer, paper, presentation.

09-12-08: Nikolaos Spanoudakis, Pavlos Moraitis. Agent Systems Engineering Methodology: The Development Process. pdf

06-12-08: PASSI SPEM 2.0 documentation (draft) 06-12-2008 pdf

Fragments extracted from the PASSI process zip

Fragments extracted from other methodologies can be found here.

V. Seidita, M. Cossentino, S. Gaglio. Using and Extending the SPEM Specifications to Represent Agent Oriented Methodologies. In Proc. of the Ninth International Workshop on Agen-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE-2008) at The Seventh International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2008), Estoril, Portugal. May, 2008. (pdf)

M. Cossentino, S. Gaglio, A. Garro, V. Seidita. Method Fragments for agent design methodologies: from standardization to research. International Journal on Agent Oriented Software Engineering (IJAOSE). 1(1). 2007. (pdf)

Seidita, V., Cossentino, M., Gaglio, S. A repository of fragments for agent systems design. Proc. Of the Workshop on Objects and Agents (WOA'06).  Catania, Italy. September 2006. (pdf)

E. Nardini, A. Molesini, A. Omicini, E. Denti. SPEM on test: the SODA case study. pdf

M. Cossentino,  N.Gaud, V. Hilaire, S. Galland, A. Koukam. ASPECS : an Agent-oriented Software Process for Engineering Complex Systems. pdf

Nikolaos Spanoudakis, Pavlos Moraitis. The Agent Systems Methodology (ASEME): A Preliminary Report. pdf

C.F. Nourani. Intelligent Tree Computing Logic, Infinite State Agent Machines and Multiagent Signatures. doc

Old FIPA Methodology TC Method Fragment Specification proposal. pdf

More documents reporting SPEM descriptions of Agent-Oriented methodologies can be found here