The complexity of communication scenarios between agents make multi-agent systems di#cult to build. Most of the existing Agent-Oriented Software Engineering methodologies face this complexity by guiding the developers through a rather waterfall-based process with a series of intermediate modeling artifacts. While these methodologies lead to executable prototypes relatively late and are expensive when requirements change, we explore a rather evolutionary approach with explicit support for change and rapid feedback. In particular, we apply Extreme Programming, a modern agile methodology from object-oriented software technology, for the design and implementation of multi-agent systems. The only modeling artifacts that are being maintained in our approach are a process model with which domain experts and developers design and communicate agent application scenarios, and the executable agent source code including automated test cases. We have successfully applied our approach for the development of a prototypical multi-agent system for clinical information logistics.

Abstract. This paper provides a definition of Round-trip Engineering (RE) and introduces RE-systems. Where previous definitions of RE are abstract in the sense that they treat views as black boxes this paper provides a more detailed definition in which views are transparent. Having transparent views enables us to reason about what happens to views during transformations. This will enable studies on the requirements on views, view transformations and view operations and how these relate to each other. RE-systems may include multiple domains and transformations between those domains. This will enable studies on the requirements on complete RE-systems. 1

. Although constraints are useful to express semantic restrictions on object structures, Java provides little support for their implementation and evaluation. We argue that constraints should be specified explicitly, and propose a set of design patterns for the representation of constraints on JavaBeans. Object-oriented reflection is used to evaluate these constraints at run-time. We show how this technology can be used to support data and knowledge acquisition, and system evaluation. 1 Introduction Constraints are meta-data about the semantic restrictions that are assumed to be satisfied in a given set of objects. For example, constraints can restrict the range of an object's integer attribute or the maximum cardinality of an array. Constraints are useful to document and communicate the semantics of classes, to validate the correctness of object states at run-time, to repair inconsistent data structures, and for various types of reasoning. Although constraints are assumed to...

This paper introduces a methodology for the development of multi-agent systems, in particular multi-agent systems that optimize the collaboration of distributed work groups like clinical departments.

this document is to show that it is both feasible and beneficial to formally specify metadata on Java objects, so that their semantics are transparent. With these metadata, machines and humans are able to prevent, detect, and eventually repair object states that violate the semantics intended by their developers

For most knowledge-based systems, knowledge must necessarily be modeled evolutionary, in a close collaboration between domain experts and engineers. While the Knowledge Engineering literature suggests to follow rather waterfall-based approaches, we argue that agile development methodologies like Extreme Programming have a huge potential to thrive and prosper in domains like knowledge-based systems. Agile approaches are optimized for projects with frequently changing requirements, provide explicit support for collaboration and rely on a minimum of modeling artifacts with smooth transitions between them.