Measurement in action: an activity-theoretical perspective on producer-user interaction
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Understanding work and designing artefacts
A Verification Framework for Agent Communication
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Towards Modeling and Reasoning Support for Early-Phase Requirements Engineering
RE '97 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering
ODAC: An Agent-Oriented Methodology Based on ODP
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Integrating agent-oriented methodologies with UML-AT
AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
The PSI3 agent recommender system
ICWE'03 Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Web engineering
Learning teamwork skills in university programming courses
Computers & Education
Language engineering techniques for the development of e-learning applications
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
Introducing a Distributed Architecture for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks
IWANN '09 Proceedings of the 10th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks: Part II: Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Soft Computing, and Ambient Assisted Living
Requirements elicitation and analysis of multiagent systems using activity theory
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
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The specification of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) involves the identification of a large number of entities and their relationships. This is a non-trivial task that requires managing different views of the system. Many problems concerning this issue originate in the presence of contradictory goals and tasks, inconsistencies, and unexpected behaviours. Such troublesome configurations should be detected and prevented during the development process in order to study alternative ways to cope with them. In this paper, we present methods and tools that support the management of contradictions during the analysis and design of MAS. Contradiction management in MAS has to consider both individual (i.e. agent) and social (i.e. organization) aspects, and their dynamics. Such issues have already been considered in social sciences, and more concretely in the Activity Theory, a social framework for the study of interactions in activity systems. Our approach applies knowledge from Activity Theory in MAS, especially its base of contradiction patterns. That requires a formalization of this social theory in order to be applicable in a software engineering context and its adaptation to agent-oriented methodologies. Then, it will be possible to check the occurrence of contradiction patterns in a MAS specification and provide solutions to those situations. This technique has been validated by implementing an assistant for the INGENIAS Development Kit and has been tested with several case studies. This paper shows part of one of these experiments for a web application.