Towards agent-oriented model-driven architecture
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Towards agent-oriented model-driven architecture Liang Xiao1 and Des Greer2 1 School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, U.K.; 2School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, U.K.
Correspondence: Liang Xiao, School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, U.K. Tel: þ 44 23 8059 5415; Fax: þ 44 23 8059 2865; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) supports the transformation from reusable models to executable software. Business representations, however, cannot be fully and explicitly represented in such models for direct transformation into running systems. Thus, once business needs change, the language abstractions used by MDA (e.g. object constraint language/action semantics), being low level, have to be edited directly. We therefore describe an agent-oriented MDA (AMDA) that uses a set of business models under continuous maintenance by business people, reflecting the current business needs and being associated with adaptive agents that interpret the captured knowledge to behave dynamically. Three contributions of the AMDA approach are identified: (1) to Agent-oriented Software Engineering, a method of building adaptive MultiAgent Systems; (2) to MDA, a means of abstracting high-level businessoriented models to align executable systems with their requirements at runtime; (3) to distributed systems, the interoperability of disparate components and services via the agent abstraction. European Journal of Information Systems (2007) 16, 390–406. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000688 Keywords: adaptive agent model; agent-oriented model-driven architecture; business knowledge model; model-driven architecture; multi-agent system; software adaptivity
Introduction and background
Received: 30 November 2006 Revised: 25 April 2007 Accepted: 27 July 2007
Business environments and business needs are often changing rapidly. Progressive change and adaptation of the supporting software systems is inevitable but the maintenance and evolution of traditional OO systems is difficult because (1) Objects inherently have static structure and behaviour. (2) Object-oriented requirements and design models in the form of UML diagrams lack the capability to describe behavioural semantics (Fowler, 2004), for which reason implemented systems cannot be directly transformed from models and so they rapidly lose their value, if maintenance changes are done at the code level only. The Object Management Group’s (OMG) Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) (Fowler, 2004; Object Management Group; Kleppe et al., 2003; Meservy & Fenstermacher, 2005; France et al., 2006) promotes the production of models with sufficient detail that they can be used to generate executable software (Mellor & Balcer, 2002). MDA proposes a Platform Independent Model (PIM), a highly abstracted model, independent of any implementation technology. This is translated to one or more Platform Specific Models (PSM), which in turn are translated into
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