Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called Tropos, for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all related mentalistic notions (for instance goals and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study. The Tropos language for conceptual modeling is formalized in a metamodel described with a set of UML class diagrams.

Information systems of the future will have to perform well within ever-changing organizational environments. Unfortunately, existing software development methodologies (object-oriented, structured or otherwise) have traditionally been inspired by programming concepts, not organizational ones, leading to a semantic gap between the software system and its operational environment. To reduce this gap, we propose a software development methodology named Tropos which is founded on concepts used to model early requirements. Our proposal adopts the i* organizational modeling framework, which o#ers the notions of actor, goal and (actor) dependency, and uses these as a foundation to model early and late requirements, architectural and detailed design. The paper outlines Tropos phases through an e-business example, and sketches a formal language which underlies the methodology and is intended to support formal analysis. The methodology seems to complement well proposals for agent-oriented programming platforms.

This paper presents the Prometheus methodology for developing intelligent agent systems. The methodology has been developed over the last several years in collaboration with Agent Oriented Software. Our goal was to develop a design process with associated deliverables which can be taught to industry practitioners and undergraduate students who do not have a background in agents and which they can use to develop intelligent agent systems. Our claim is that Prometheus is developed in sufficient detail to be used by a non-expert. Our evidence is, at this stage, still anecdotal; however, the indications are that Prometheus is usable by non-experts and that they find it useful

Information systems of the future will have to better match their operational organizational environment. Unfortunately, development methodologies have traditionally been inspired by programming concepts, not organizational ones, leading to a semantic gap between the system and its environment. To reduce as much as possible this gap, this paper proposes a development methodology named Tropos which is founded on concepts used to model early requirements. Our proposal adopts the i* organizational modeling framework [21], which offers the notions of actor, goal and (actor) dependency, and uses these as a foundation to model early and late requirements, architectural and detailed design. The paper outlines Tropos phases through an e-business example, and sketches a formal language which underlies the methodology and is intended to support formal analysis. The methodology seems to complement well proposals for agent-oriented programming platforms.

Abstract. Tropos is a novel agent-oriented software development methodology founded on two key features: (i) the notions of agent, goal, plan and various other knowledge level concepts are fundamental primitives used uniformly throughout the software development process; and (ii) a crucial role is assigned to requirements analysis and specification when the system-to-be is analyzed with respect to its intended environment. This paper provides a (first) detailed account of the Tropos methodology. In particular, we describe the basic concepts on which Tropos is founded and the types of models one builds out of them. We also specify the analysis process through which design flows from external to system actors through a goal analysis and delegation. In addition, we provide an abstract syntax for Tropos diagrams and other linguistic constructs. 1

A formalism for the specification of multiagent systems should be expressive and illustrative enough to model not only the behavior of one single agent, but also the collaboration among several agents and the influences caused by external events from the environment. For this, state machines [25] seem to provide an adequate means. Furthermore, it should be easily possible to obtain an implementation for each agent automatically from this specification. Last but not least, it is desirable to be able to check whether the multiagent system satisfies some interesting properties. Therefore, the formalism should also allow for the verification or formal analysis of multiagent systems, e.g. by model checking [6]. In this paper, a framework is introduced, which allows us to express declarative aspects of multiagent systems by means of (classical) propositional logic and procedural aspects of these systems by means of state machines (statecharts). Nowadays statecharts are a well accepted means to specify dynamic behavior of software systems. They are a part of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We describe in a rigorously formal manner, how the specification of spatial knowledge and robot interaction and its verification by model checking can be done, integrating different methods from the field of artificial intelligence such as qualitative (spatial) reasoning and the situation calculus. As example application domain, we will consider robotic soccer, see also [24, 31], which present predecessor work towards a formal logic-based approach for agents engineering.

From a software engineering perspective, agent systems are a specialization of object-oriented (OO) systems, inwE2] individual objects have theirow threads of control and their ow goals or sense of purpose. Engineering such systems is most naturally approached as an extension of object-oriented systems engineering. In particular, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be naturally extended to support the distinctive requirements of multi-agent systems. One such requirement results from the increasing emphasis on the correspondencebetwsp multi-agent systems and social systems. Sociological analogies are proving fruitful models for agent-oriented constructions,wons sociologists increasingly use agents as a modeling tool for studying social systems. We combine several existing organizational models for agents, including AALAADIN, dependency theory, interaction protocols, and holonics, in a general theoretical framework, and show how UML can be applied and extended to capture constructions in that framework.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is the one of the most recent contributions to the field of Software Engineering. It has several benefits compared to existing development approaches, in particular the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. This paper gives an overview of recent research and industrial applications of both general high-level methodologies and on more specific design methodologies for industry-strength software engineering.

Debugging multi-agent systems (which are concurrent, distributed, and consist of complex components) is difficult, yet crucial. We propose that the debugging process can be improved by following an agent-oriented design methodology, and then using the design artifacts in the debugging phase. We present an example of this scheme which uses interaction protocols to debug agent interaction. Interaction protocols are specified using AUML and are translated to Petri nets. The debugger uses the Petri nets to monitor conversations and to provide precise and informative error messages when protocols aren't correctly followed by the agents.

Abstract. Business rules are statements that express (certain parts of) a business policy, defining business terms and defining or constraining the operations of an enterprise, in a declarative manner. Since these rules define and constrain the interaction among business agents in the course of business processes, they have to refer to the components of their mental state, such as the knowledge/information and the commitments of an organization. We propose an agent-oriented approach to business rules and show how to represent and visualize business rules and business processes in Agent-Object-Relationship modeling. 1