From a Goal-Oriented Methodology to a BDI Agent Language: The Case of Tropos and Alan Francesco Pagliarecci 1 , Loris Penserini 2 , and Luca Spalazzi 1 1 Universit` a Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona pagliarecci@diiga.univpm.it,spalazzi@diiga.univpm.it 2 FBK-IRST, Trento penserini@itc.it Abstract. This approach aims at addressing crucial issues in complex distributed software such as capability of evolving and adaptivity. Within the area of goal- oriented software requirements engineering, we propose the use of goal models at different abstraction levels in engineering a Multi-Agent System (MAS), namely, not only at design time, but also as a part of the agent knowledge and choice strategy, at run-time. In this paper we briefly overview a mapping between Tropos concepts and Alan (an agent-object programming language) structures. Specifi- cally, we focus on two advantages of our approach: first, Alan allows us to use in an integrated fashion both agent oriented and object oriented design princi- ples. Second, Alan has a well defined semantics expressed by means of rewriting logic. This allows us to verify the properties of an agent both at design time and at run-time (when its knowledge and behavior can have been modified). 1 Introduction In the era of networked applications within areas of eGovernament, Ambient Intelli- gence, Autonomic Systems, and Digital Business Ecosystems, software solutions have dramatically increased their complexity in respect to traditional applications. This trend directly reflects towards software engineering approaches that have to be flexible and suitable to cope with more complex software requirements. In this context, the challenging aspect is that stakeholder needs and preferences, as well as domain constraints often evolve away from the initial business requirement model of the system, reflecting the extremely heterogeneous and dynamic nature of networked users. Under such conditions, a deployed software solution needs to be able to adapt to environmental constraints at run-time in order to meet evolving user needs. This paper aims at building an agent-based software development framework to gen- erate software solutions adaptable to stakeholder needs, supporting organisational net- working as well as improving adaptability to rapidly changing market demands and customer requirements. The main idea that pervades our approach is twofold. First, we adopt an agent oriented software engineering methodology, Tropos [1], to characterize the agent model (say Goal-Model, GM) for architectural and functional requirements. Second, we perform a mapping process of the previous GM towards a BDI agent lan- guage, named Alan [3]. Such a framework also provides a novel approach to cope with software maintenance, where the modification of a software product after its delivery R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM 2007 Ws, Part I, LNCS 4805, pp. 105–114, 2007. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007