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Formal and Informal specification in Agent Oriented software development Extended Abstract
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Perini, Anna Susi, Angelo |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | A considerable effort in defining Agent-Oriented (AO) appro aches to engineering distributed systems is going on based on the recognition tha t the agent paradigm, beside providing a useful technology to build software system s with an open architecture, offers appropriate abstractions for specifying and design ing critical properties of these system, such as the dynamic evolution of their architecture and the interaction protocols of system components [5, 8, 9, 13]. Most of the proposed software engineering methodologies ad opt visual modeling as a core process which drives the whole software development, from requirement analysis to implementation. The conceptual languages they use pr ovide an effective graphical notation, but often lack a formal definition of their semanti c 1. This can result to subjective models which can hardly be refined in a straightforward w ay into a system design. Formal specification languages can solve some of the weaknes ses of visual modeling languages, specifically, they permit to define models with a p recise semantics, and facilitate their transformation into system designs. However, w riting a formal specification usually require strong skills, and it is often ineffective f or discussing with the stakeholders. Moreover, the formalization “a posteriori” of visual m odels expressed according to a conceptual modeling framework is not an easy task at all, du e to the ambiguities in the meaning of the graphical notations. In a previous work [12] we proposed a framework which rests on a light integration of informal and formal languages, adopting Tropos[3, 11], an Agent Oriented software development methodology which provides a conceptual model ing language that can be used to build both an informal specification or a formal one [6 ]. From a practical point of view, the methodology guides the software engineer in bui lding a conceptual model that is incrementally refined and extended from an early requ i ments model, namely a representation of the organizational setting where the sys tem-to-be will be introduced, to system design artifacts, according to a requirements-dr iven approach. TheTroposmodeling language allows to represent intentional and soci al concepts, such as actor and goal, and a set of relationships between the m, such as actor dependency, goal decomposition, means-end and contribution rel ationships. A diagrammatic |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://lia.deis.unibo.it/confs/aev2004/submissions/pdf/perini.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
