Towards Method Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems: A Validation of a Generic MAS Metamodel

  • Authors:

  • Graham Low;Ghassan Beydoun;Brian Henderson-Sellers;Cesar Gonzalez-Perez

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Faculty of Informatics, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia;Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology of Sydney, Sydney, Australia;School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology of Sydney, Sydney, Austra ...

  • Venue:
  • Agent Computing and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

It is a widely accepted premise that no single methodology can be suitable for all Multi-Agent System (MAS) software projects. This premise is playing a significant role in the appearance of new methodologies at an increasing pace. To effectively harness the software engineering knowledge of methodologies, method engineering is an appealing approach. It focuses on project-specific methodology construction from existing method fragments and it requires a gen- eric product-focussed metamodel to serve as a representational infrastructure to unify existing methodologies into a single specification. As part of its ongoing validation towards method engineering for MAS development, we present our generic metamodel and illustrate in this paper its wide applicability with respect to 10 methodologies extant agent-oriented. This validation provides further evidence to support the use of our metamodel towards the construction of situated MAS methodologies.