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In the paper we study the dynamics of roles played by agents in multiagent systems. We capture role dynamics in terms of four operation performed by agents: `enactment', `deactment', `activate', and `deactivate'. The use of these operations are motivated, in particular for open systems. A formal semantics for these operations are provided. This formalization is aimed at serving as a basis for implementation of role dynamics in an agent programming language such as 3APL.

Several surveys indicate that a significant percentage of data warehouses fail to meet business objectives or are outright failures. One of the reasons for this is that requirement analysis is typically overlooked in real projects. In this paper we propose a goal-oriented approach to requirement analysis for data warehouses, based on the Tropos methodology. Two different perspectives are integrated for requirement analysis: organizational modeling, centered on stakeholders, and decisional modeling, focused on decision makers. Our approach can be employed within both a demand-driven and a mixed supply/demand-driven design framework: in the second case, while the operational sources are still explored to shape hierarchies, user requirements play a fundamental role in restricting the area of interest for analysis and in choosing facts, dimensions, and measures. The methodology proposed, supported by a prototype, is described with reference to a real case study. 1

Recently, a plethora of languages for modeling and specifying different facets of e-Services have been proposed, and some of them provides constructs for representing time. Time is needed in many contexts to correctly capture the dynamics of transactions and of composability between e-Services. However, to the best of our knowledge, all the proposed languages for representing e-Service behaviour and temporal constraints lack both a clear semantics and an underlying conceptual model. In this paper, we propose a conceptual representation of e-Service behaviour, taking time constraints into account, and a new XML-based language, namely WSTL (WEB SERVICE TRANSITION LANGUAGE), that integrates well with standard languages in order to completely specify e-Services. In particular, WSTL allows for specifying an e-Service starting from its conceptual representation, in a straightforward way.

Designing and controlling cooperative applications composed from e-Services poses new and complex research problems. In the present paper, a model for specifying cooperative applications based on e-Services is proposed, which allows representing both statical and dynamic aspects of cooperating e-Services, and orchestration specifications in a dynamically evolving distributed environment. The characteristics of a run-time architecture for supporting flexible application executions are discussed. Substitution of e-Services with other ones with similar characteristics both at design-time and at run-time is discussed. Orchestration is performed without the need of centralized control on the flow of activities, thus allowing peer-to-peer interaction between cooperating organizations.

Software 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, rather than organizational ones, leading to a semantic gap between system and its operational environment. To reduce this gap, we propose a software development methodology named Tropos which is founded on the i * organizational modeling framework. i * offers the notions of actor, goal and (actor) dependency. Tropos uses these concepts as a basis to model early and late requirements, architectural and detailed design for a software system. The paper outlines Tropos phases through an e-business example. The methodology complements well proposals for agent-oriented programming platforms. 1

Abstract. Tropos is an agent-oriented software methodology proposed in [1, 2]. The methodology is founded on the notions of agent and goal, and goal analysis is used extensively to support software development during different phases. This paper adopts a formal goal model defined and analyzed in [9, 15] to make the goal analysis process concrete through the use of forward and backward reasoning for goal models. The formal goal analysis is illustrated through examples, using an implemented goal reasoning tool.

In the last years, multi-agent systems (MAS) have proved more and more successful. The need of a quality software engineering approach to their design arises together with the need of new methodological ways to address important issues such as ontology representation, security concerns and production costs. The introduction of an extensive pattern reuse practice can be determinant in cutting down the time and cost of developing these systems.

Aspects are behaviours that are tangled and scattered across a system. In requirements documentation, aspects manifest themselves as descriptions of behaviours that are intertwined and interdependent. Some aspects may be obvious, as specifications of typical crosscutting behaviour. Others may be more subtle, making them hard to identify. In either case, it is difficult to analyse requirements to locate all points in the system where the aspects should be applied. To identify aspects early in the software lifecycle developers need support for aspect identification and analysis in requirements documentation. To address this, we have devised the Theme/Doc approach for viewing the relationships between behaviours in a requirements document to identify and isolate aspects in the requirements. This paper describes the approach, and illustrates it with a case study and analysis.

Synthesis of behaviour models from software development artifacts such as scenario-based descriptions or requirements specifications not only helps significantly reduce the effort of model construction, but also provides a bridge between approaches geared toward requirements analysis and those geared towards reasoning about system design at the architectural level. However, the models favoured by existing synthesis approaches are not sufficiently expressive to describe both universal constraints provided by requirements and existential statements provided by scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel synthesis technique that constructs behaviour models in the form of Modal Transition Systems (MTS) from a combination of safety properties and scenarios. MTSs distinguish required, possible and proscribed behaviour, and their elaboration not only guarantees the preservation of the properties and scenarios used for synthesis but also supports further elicitation of new requirements. 1