The construction of ad-hoc design processes following the Situational Method Engineering (SME) paradigm is currently carried out by adopting a set of phases for which, until now, no well defined techniques and guidelines have been established. The consequence is that organizations are very dependent on method designers ’ skills. In this paper, we propose an approach based on SME for constructing customized agent oriented design processes. Our approach adopts the metamodel as the most important factor leading to the selection and assembly of method fragments and an algorithm for establishing the instantiation order of metamodel elements. The algorithm makes the proposed approach repeatable and usable even by not very skilled personnel thus proposing an improvement to the actual situation. The proposed approach and the algorithm are also experimented through the construction of a design process (ASPECS) for developing dynamic hierarchical societies of agents. The approach we created is general enough to be applied in other development contexts (not only agent-oriented).

Abstract. This paper synthesizes two trends in the engineering of agent-based systems. One, modern agent-oriented methodologies deal with the key aspects of software development including requirements acquisition, architecture, and design, but can benefit from a stronger treatment of flexible interactions. Two, commitment protocols declaratively capture interactions among business partners, thus facilitating flexible behavior and a sophisticated notion of compliance. However, they lack support for engineering concerns such as inducing the desired roles and selecting the right protocols. This paper combines these two directions. For concreteness, we choose the Tropos methodology, which is strong in its requirements analysis, but our results can be ported to other agent-oriented methodologies. Our approach is as follows. First, using Tropos, analyze requirements based on dependencies between actors. Second, select top-level protocols based on the actors’ hard goals, while respecting the logical boundaries of their interactions. Third, select refined protocols based on the actors ’ soft goals. Consequently, Tropos provides a rigorous basis for modeling and composing protocols whereas the protocols help produce perspicuous designs that respect the participants ’ autonomy. We evaluate our approach using a large existing case. 1

We present details of a goal-oriented process for database requirements analysis. This process consists of a number of steps, spanning the spectrum from high-level stakeholder goal analysis to detailed conceptual schema design. The paper shows how goal modeling contributes to a systematic scoping and analysis of the application domain to elicit an initial domain of discourse, from which the conceptual schema is derived by transformation, using a series of schema design operations. Moreover, a goal-oriented design strategy is proposed to structure the transformational schema design according to a set of user defined design priorities (including data quality dimensions), also modeled as goals. The proposed process is illustrated step-by-step using a running example from the design of a real-world, industrial biological database. We also report early progress towards building full tool support, by presenting a prototype that captures and stores design sessions in a queryable form. This facility makes it possible to answer questions that are hard, if not impossible, to answer using existing methodologies for database design. 1

Reasoning about Risk in Agent’s Deliberation Process: a Jadex Implementation Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems have been proved to be useful in several safety-critical applications. However, in current agent architectures (particularly BDI architectures) the deliberation process does not include any form of risk analysis. In this paper, we propose guidelines to implement Tropos Goal-Risk reasoning. Our proposal aims at introducing risk reasoning in the deliberation process of a BDI agent so that the overall set of possible plans is evaluated with respect to risk. When the level of risk results too high, agents can consider and introduce additional plans, called treatments, that produce an overall reduction of the risk. Side effects of treatments are also considered as part of the model. To make the discussion more concrete, we illustrate the proposal with a case study on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle agent. 1

Abstract. At present, the software engineering community places emphasis on the relevance of understanding the organizational context before starting the development of an information system. In this context, several research works focus on proposing mechanisms to generate information systems from early requirements specifications in an agent-based approach. However, only a few research works offer a guided process for carrying out the equivalence between the organizational and requirements models. In this paper, a methodological approach for deriving the software system functionality from organizational models is presented. In the proposed method, the organizational goals are the basis for determining the relevant plans to be automated with a software system. A pattern language is also used to systematically carry out the equivalence between the organizational and late requirements models. The Tropos Framework (which is one of the most well-founded, agent-oriented methodologies) is used to represent the organizational environment. By proposing rules to perform the model transformation process, we go a step further in the process of including organizational modeling as a key piece in the software production process 1.

Abstract — Leveraging service oriented programming paradigm would significantly affect the way people build software systems. However, to achieve this goal a solid software design methodology should be grounded on proper mathematical foundations, specific service-oriented principles, concepts and patterns. This paper contributes to the above goal proposing a lightweight, but complete, mathematical framework capable of capturing the essential components of service-oriented programming paradigm. To this end, we propose mathematical definitions for individual service, service-oriented environment and service-oriented application. Analysis of the properties and the functionalities of these components with respect to data processing mechanisms enables us to introduce a service-oriented application classification schema. For each application class we first identify specific properties and then discuss their use in a service-oriented design methodology.

Abstract. Business Intelligence (BI) software aims to enable business users to easily access and analyze relevant enterprise information so that they can make timely and fact-based decisions. However, despite userfriendly features such as dashboards and other visualizations, business users still find BI software hard to use and inflexible for their needs. Furthermore, current BI initiatives require significant efforts by IT specialists to understand business operations and requirements, in order to build BI applications and help formulate queries. In this paper, we present a vision for BI that is driven by enterprise modeling. The Business Intelligence Model (BIM) aims to enable business users to conceptualize business operations and strategies and performance indicators in a way that can be connected to enterprise data through highly automated tools. The BIM draws upon well-established business practices such as Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Maps as well as requirements and conceptual modeling techniques such as goal modeling. The connection from BIM to databases is supported by a complementary research effort on conceptual data integration.

... this paper, we present the Tropos metamodel starting from the basic concepts of actor, goal, plan, resource and social dependency and then we illustrate its use by introducing an extension intended to introduce concepts for modelling security concerns. We also sketch the Tropos modelling environment and compare with the metamodels of other software development methodologies.

Figure 7. Actor diagram for the Media Shop focusing on the goal internet shop managed Figure 8. A snapshot of the GR-Tool Figure 9. Quantitative backward analysis options Figure 10. Formal Tropos specificationList of Tables

Abstract. In designing most systems, requirements analysts face many competing requirements, such as performance, usability, costs, and so forth. Ideally, analysts would like to quantitatively measure consequences of solutions on requirements and risks, and extract stakeholders ’ preferences in terms of numerical weights. However, during the early stages of requirements and system design, it is hard to quantitatively measure all factors on a similar scale and quantify stakeholders ’ preferences. This contribution proposes a semi-automated decision aid tool which allows the use of available but potentially incomplete quantitative and qualitative requirements and risk measures. It removed the need to elicit importance weights of requirements. Instead, stakeholders are asked how much they would relax the demand on one objective to better achieve another. The proposed tool extends the Even Swap method with formally defined rules for suggesting the next swap to decision stakeholders.