Design of Multiagent System Architecture
González Moreno, Juan Carlos
Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Informática,
Departamento de Informática, Universidad de Vigo,
As Lagoas s/n, 32004, Ourense, Spain
jcmoreno@uvigo.es
Vázquez López, Luis
Departamento de Informática, Universidad de Vigo
C/. Benito Vicetto nº: 48
27400, Monforte de Lemos (Lugo), Spain
eldelima@terra.es
Abstract
It is described that has been a noticeable increase
in the use of agent oriented methodologies. Related to
the process of requirements analysis and acquisition,
various works have been published in recent years
related to some methodologies. Despite this, there are
not many proposals which seek to apply these results
through its implementation with multiagente systems.
This is the main aim of this study: the develop of a
system that allows to get an initial architectural model
based on INGENIAS from a detailed description in
natural language of the system required by means of
the processing of almost automatic form of the
description of the system to resolving.
1. Introduction
One of the greatest challenges facing the agent
oriented software engineering is the definition of the
problem, defined as "the process by which customers /
users and computer analysts, are reported in Natural
Language in order to understand and model what is the
application needed". In this process, the ambiguity of
natural language is a problem that difficult the
interpretation of the requirements of the problem
domain, resulting in inappropriate responses or
customer dissatisfaction with the solutions presented.
In order to alleviate these problems has been
proposed the Requirements Elicitation Process which
can be defined as the process of acquiring all
knowledge that is important and necessary to produce
a requirement model in a problem domain.
Within this area you can find many suggestions to
extract all relevant information in developing software
requirements from texts written in natural language.
Usually, these solutions are based on reformulating
descriptions of the problem. These proposals improve
the quality of the model obtained and try to shorten the
development time (one of the critical factors in modern
software development processes), but are faced with
the difficulty of the active involvement of customers /
users in the life cycle the application.
In agent oriented developments the complexity of
the problem and the need for a distributed solution
suggest that contact and involvement of customers /
users in the process was more necessary and decisive
to establish the model.
INGENIAS [8] is a recent methodological proposal
for the development of applications based on Multi-
Agent Systems. The proposal has a good definition of
the modelling elements in which it is based, allows the
use of the Unified Development Process as its life
cycle and allows to obtain a consistently, and sound
code from the specification model.
Of all there is known the scanty participation of the
client/users in the process of development of the
software. The participation it is frequent that happen
transfers of the analysts to the clients who only are
warned in later phases of the process of development
and who cause costly modifications in the application
due to the incomplete of requirements in the model.
This situation is motivated (in part) to the ambiguity
of the natural language in which the transfer is based.
In [4] a method to solve this gap is presented. This
method is based on make several translations from the
initial description in Spanish language to a semiformal
model in INGENIAS notation. To implement this
method a Multi-Agent System (MAS) is proposed in
the later sections.
The outline of the rest of the article is as follows:
First it is presented the INGENIAS methodology that
Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference
0730-3157/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE
DOI
565
Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference
0730-3157/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/COMPSAC.2008.169
565
Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference
0730-3157/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/COMPSAC.2008.169
565