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Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. CSC532 Xiaomei Huang. Outline. Introduction Agent-oriented analysis and design Formal Methods for AOSE conclusions. 1.2 What are Agent-Based Systems ?.

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Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

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  1. Agent-Oriented Software Engineering CSC532 Xiaomei Huang

  2. Outline • Introduction • Agent-oriented analysis and design • Formal Methods for AOSE • conclusions

  3. 1.2 What are Agent-Based Systems? • By an agent-based system, we mean one in which the key abstraction used is that of an agent. Agent-based systems may contain a single agent, but the greatest potential lies in the application of multi-agent systems.

  4. An agent-based system enjoys the following properties: autonomy: agents encapsulate some state (that is not accessible to other agents), and make decisions about what to do based on this state, without the direct intervention of humans or others; reactivity: agents are situated in an environment, (which may be the physical world, a user via a graphical user interface, a collection of other agents, the INTERNET, or perhaps many of these combined), are able to perceive this environment (through the use of potentially imperfect sensors), and are able to respond in a timely fashion to changes that occur in it;

  5. pro-activeness: agents do not simply act in response to their environment, they are able to exhibit goal-directed behaviour by taking the initiative; social ability: agents interact with other agents (and possibly humans) via some kind of agent-communication language ,and typically have the ability to engage in social activities (such as cooperative problem solving or negotiation) in order to achieve their goals.

  6. Reasons that agent-based system are seen as a important new direction: 1. Natural metaphor. Just as the many domains can be conceived of consisting of a number of interacting but essentially passive objects, so many others can be conceived as interacting, active, purposeful agents. 2.Distribution of data or control. For many software systems, it is not possible to identify a single locus of control: instead, overall control of the systems is distributed across a number computing nodes, which are frequently geographically distributed. In order to make such systems work effectively, these nodes must be capable of autonomously interacting with each other— they must agents.

  7. 3. Legacy systems A natural way of incorporating legacy systems into modern distributed information systems is to agentify them: to “wrap” them with an agent layer, that will enable them to interact with other agents. 4. Open systems Many systems are open in the sense that it is impossible to know at design time exactly what components the system will be comprised of, and how these components will be used to interact with one-another. To operate effectively in such systems, the ability to engage in flexible autonomous decision-making is critical.

  8. 1.2 On the Relationship between Agents and Objects The traditional view of an object and our view of an agent have at least three distinctions: – agents embody stronger notion of autonomy than objects, and in particular, they decide for themselves whether or not to perform an action on request from another agent; – agents are capable of flexible (reactive, pro-active, social) behavior, and the standard object model has nothing to say about such types of behavior; – a multi-agent system is inherently multi-threaded, in that each agent is assumed to have at least one thread of control.

  9. 2 Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design Development methodologies for the analysis and design of agent-based system. 1. Kinny et al: The AAII Methodology 2. Wooldridge et al: Gaia 3. Odell et al: Agent UML 4. Treur et al: DESIRE 5.,Collinot et al: Cassiopeia 6. Luck and d’Inverno: Agents in Z

  10. 3 Formal Methods for AOSE 3.1 Formal Methods in Specification 3.2 Formal Methods in Implementation Refinement. Directly executing gent specifications Compiling Agent Specifications.

  11. 3.3 Formal Verification Two verification approaches have evidenced themselves in agent-based systems. 1. Axiomatic Approaches: Deductive Verification. 2. Semantic Approaches: Model Checking.

  12. 4. Conclusions Key obstacles that must be overcome in order for AOSE to become “mainstream”: 1. Sorting out the relationship of agents to other software paradigms — objects in particular. 2. Agent-oriented methodologies. 3. Engineering for open systems. 4. Engineering for scalability.

  13. Reference 1. A. H. Bond and L. Gasser, editors. Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers: San Mateo, CA, 1988. 2. G. Booch. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (second edition). Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA, 1994. 3. Charles Petrie, agent-Based Software Engineering http://nrc.stanford.edu/~petrie/agents/abse/abse.html

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