Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology

  • Authors:

  • Paolo Bresciani;Anna Perini;Paolo Giorgini;Fausto Giunchiglia;John Mylopoulos

  • Affiliations:

  • ITC-Irst, Povo (Trento), Italy/ bresciani@irst.itc.it;ITC-Irst, Povo (Trento), Italy/ perini@irst.itc.it;Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Trento, Italy/ paolo.giorgini@dit.unitn.it;Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Trento, Italy/ fausto@dit.unitn.it;Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada/ jm@cs.toronto.edu

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called Tropos,1 for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all related mentalistic notions (for instance goals and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study. The Tropos language for conceptual modeling is formalized in a metamodel described with a set of UML class diagrams.