An actor dependency model of organizational work: with application to business process reengineering
COCS '93 Proceedings of the conference on Organizational computing systems
Modelling strategic relationships for process reengineering
Modelling strategic relationships for process reengineering
Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Protocols for processes: programming in the large for open systems (extended abstract)
OOPSLA '04 Companion to the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
Interaction Protocols as Design Abstractions for Business Processes
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An algebra for commitment protocols
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Goal-oriented requirements analysis and reasoning in the Tropos methodology
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Amoeba: A methodology for modeling and evolving cross-organizational business processes
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Requirements-Driven Collaborative Choreography Customization
ICSOC-ServiceWave '09 Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Service-Oriented Computing
An aspect-oriented modeling framework for multi-agent systems design
AOSE'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering VII
Reasoning about agents and protocols via goals and commitments
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 1
Analyzing contract robustness through a model of commitments
AOSE'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Agent-oriented software engineering
A formal treatment of agents, goals and operations using alternating-time temporal logic
SBMF'11 Proceedings of the 14th Brazilian conference on Formal Methods: foundations and Applications
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This paper synthesizes two trends in the engineering of agent-based systems. One, modern agent-oriented methodologies deal with the key aspects of software development including requirements acquisition, architecture, and design, but can benefit from a stronger treatment of flexible interactions. Two, commitment protocols declaratively capture interactions among business partners, thus facilitating flexible behavior and a sophisticated notion of compliance. However, they lack support for engineering concerns such as inducing the desired roles and selecting the right protocols. This paper combines these two directions. For concreteness, we choose the Tropos methodology, which is strong in its requirements analysis, but our results can be ported to other agent-oriented methodologies. Our approach is as follows. First, using Tropos, analyze requirements based on dependencies between actors. Second, select top-level protocols based on the actors' hard goals, while respecting the logical boundaries of their interactions. Third, select refined protocols based on the actors' soft goals. Consequently, Tropos provides a rigorous basis for modeling and composing protocols whereas the protocols help produce perspicuous designs that respect the participants' autonomy. We evaluate our approach using a large existing case.