Tool-Supported Development with Tropos: The Conference Management System Case Study
The agent-oriented software engineering methodology Tropos offers a structured development process and supporting tools for developing complex, distributed systems.
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Abstract. The agent-oriented software engineering methodology Tropos offers a structured development process and supporting tools for developing complex, distributed systems. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, to illustrate the use of Tropos to develop a Multi-Agent System, performing basic analysis and design activities, code generation and testing, with the support of a set of tools; second, to enable the comparison with other, tool-supported, agent-oriented software engineering methodologies through a description of the main steps of these activities and of excerpts of the resulting artefacts, with reference to a common case study, namely, the Conference Management System case study.
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Introduction
Many Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies have been proposed over the last years [13,7]. This fact motivated research on how to compare and evaluate these methodologies, with the purpose of pointing out differences and complementarities, and of giving criteria for selecting the most appropriate methodology, for a given development scenario [13,5]. While this research field is becoming more mature, a need is emerging for detailed guidelines when applying a methodology along core phases in the software development process, and for supporting tools. This is considered a crucial step towards the adoption of AOSE methodology by industry. The Tropos methodology, proposed in [3], is an agent-oriented methodology for developing complex, distributed systems. A peculiarity of Tropos is that it adopts a requirement driven approach to software development, recognizing a pivotal role to the modelling of domain stakeholders and to the analysis of their goals, before generating a design for the system-to-be. System design then consists in specifying software agents who have their own goals and capabilities that are intended to support the fulfilment of stakeholder goals. M. Luck and L. Padgham (Eds.): AOSE 2007, LNCS 4951, pp. 182–196, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
Tool-Supported Development with Tropos
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Further research on the Tropos methodology focused on its application in developing specific classes of applications, as for instance distributed knowledge management systems [23]. Moreover, extensions of its modelling language have been proposed to support the analysis of crucial issues in distributed systems, such as trust and security [10]. Several tools have been built as well. TAOM4e, for supporting a model-driven, agent-oriented approach to software development [19,17], the T-Tool [9], for performing model-checking of Tropos specifications, the GR-Tool for supporting formal reasoning on goal models [12], multi-agent planning for supporting the selection among alternative networks of delegations [4]. The main objectives of this paper are: first, to illustrate how to use Tropos to develop a Multi-Agent System (MAS), performing basic analysis and design activities, generating code and performing testing on it, with the support of a set of tools; second, to enable the comparison
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