From AO Methodologies to MAS Infrastructures: The SODA Case Study

  • Authors:

  • Ambra Molesini;Enrico Denti;Andrea Omicini

  • Affiliations:

  • Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy 40136;Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy 40136;Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna a Cesena, Cesena, Italy 47023

  • Venue:
  • Engineering Societies in the Agents World VIII
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In the last years, research on agent-oriented (AO) methodologies and multi-agent system (MAS) infrastructures has developed along two opposite paths: while AO methodologies have essentially undergone a top-down evolution pushed by contributions from heterogeneous fields like human sciences, MAS infrastructures have mostly followed a bottom-up path growing from existing and widespread (typically object-oriented) technologies. This dichotomy has produced a conceptual gap between the proposed AO methodologies and the agent infrastructures actually available, as well as a technical gap in the MAS engineering practice, where methodologies are often built ad hocout of MAS infrastructures, languages and tools.This paper proposes a new method for filling the gap between methodologies and infrastructures based on the definition and study of the meta-models of both AO methodologies and MAS infrastructures. By allowing structural representation of abstractions to be captured along with their mutual relations, meta-models make it possible to map design-time abstractions from AO methodologies upon run-time abstractions from MAS technologies, thus promoting a more coherent and effective practice in MAS engineering. In order to validate our method, we take an AO methodology --- SODA--- and show how it can be mapped upon three different MAS infrastructures using meta-models as mapping guidelines.