Describing AgentOriented Design Patterns in Tropos

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Describing Agent-Oriented Design Patterns in
Tropos

• Carla Silva, Jaelson Castro, Patrícia Tedesco and
  Ismênia Silva

• LER Laboratório de Engenharia de Requisitos
• ctlls, jbc,pcart,igls_at_cin.ufpe.br

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Agenda

• Tropos
• Motivation
• Detailed Design Process
• Social Patterns Description
• Contributions
• Future Work

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Agent Oriented Development

• The increasing interest in software agents and
  multi-agent systems has recently led to the
  development of new methodologies based on agent
  concepts.

• The Tropos framework

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Tropos Phases

• Tropos offers an approach to guide the
  development of agent-oriented systems and
  supports four phases of the software development
  lifecycle .

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Tropos Concepts

• The Tropos framework uses concepts and models
  offered by i framework at various phases phases
  of the software development lifecycle .

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Architectural Design Model
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Detailed Design Phase

• introduce additional detail for each
  architectural component of a system
• reduce development costs
• promote reuse
• improve flexibility
• improve understandability.

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Social Patterns
Design patterns recurrent in multi-agent and
cooperative systems.

• Pair patterns
• Booking
• Call-for-proposal
• Subscription
• Bidding

• Mediation patterns
• Monitor
• Broker
• Matchmaker
• Mediator
• Embassy
• Wrapper

Kolp, Do, Faulkner and Hoang 2005
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Motivation

• Lack of a systematic way to choose and apply the
  social patterns
• Lack of a detailed description of the social
  patterns

Detailed Design Process
Template UML Diagrams Code
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Detailed Design Process

• Activity 1. Identify constraints
• Activity 2. Match the proper social patterns
• Activity 3. Match the patterns participants
• Activity 4. Establish the relationships

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Architectural Design Model
Constraint The identification of some Editor
agent is not known at design time.
Solution Using the yellow pages service
provided by the Matchmaker Pattern.
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Social Patterns Description

• A subset of the template proposed by GOF Gamma,
  Helm, Johnson and Vlissides 1995
• Three UML Rumbaugh, Jacobson and Booch 1999
  extended diagrams to capture the behaviour,
  structure and collaboration of each pattern.

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Social Patterns Description
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Structure
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Structure Specialization
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Collaboration
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Collaboration Specialization
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Behaviour
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Sample Code

• The extended UMLs class diagram is able to
  provide a sufficient description of the agents
  involved in the pattern aiming at a JADE
  implementation.

To Promote an automatic code generation in JADE
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Contributions

• A process which facilitates the choice and
  application of the social patterns to MAS
  architectural detailed design.
• A template for specifying the social patterns in
  order to promote a better understanding of them.

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Contributions

• The UML extended diagrams are FIPA compliant.
• Social patterns description is independent of
  agent architecture.
• However... Its dependent of a specific agent
  platform

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Future Work

• Using UML extended diagrams which are platform
  independent.
• Other real case studies
• Improving the selection of the social patterns
• Developing a catalogue of the social patterns
• Etc

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Links

• Tropos Project
• www.troposproject.org
• Laboratório de Engenharia de Requisitos
• www.cin.ufpe.br/ler
• Join US _at_ LER
• Msc PhD Enrollment is open
• Deadline October 31st