Towards a Methodology for Engineering Self-Organising Emergent Systems

  • Authors:

  • Tom De Wolf;Tom Holvoet

  • Affiliations:

  • AgentWise@DistriNet Research Group, Department of Computer Science, KULeuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001 Leuven, Belgium, {Tom.DeWolf,Tom.Holvoet}@cs.kuleuven.be, http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/̋t ...;AgentWise@DistriNet Research Group, Department of Computer Science, KULeuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001 Leuven, Belgium, {Tom.DeWolf,Tom.Holvoet}@cs.kuleuven.be, http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/̋t ...

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Self-Organization and Autonomic Informatics (I)
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

When designing self-organising emergent multi-agent systems (MASs), a fundamental engineering issue is to achieve a macroscopic behaviour that meets the requirements and emerges only from the behaviour of locally interacting agents. Agent-oriented methodologies today are mainly focussed on engineering the microscopic issues, i.e. the agents, their rules, how they interact, etc, without explicit support for engineering the required macroscopic behaviour. As a consequence, the macroscopic behaviour is achieved in an ad-hoc manner. This paper proposes a way to define a full life-cycle methodology based on an industry-ready software engineering process, i.e. the Unified Process, which is customised to explicitly focus on engineering macroscopic behaviour of self-organising emergent MASs. As such, the MAS paradigm is integrated into an existing and widely accepted methodology and we can systematically develop a solution that exhibits the required macroscopic behaviour.