The evolution of tropos: Contexts, commitments and adaptivity

Software evolution is the main research focus of the Tropos group at University of Trento (UniTN): how do we build systems that are aware of their requirements, and are able to dynamically reconfigure themselves in response to changes in context (the environment within which they operate) and requirements. The purpose of this report is to offer an overview of ongoing work at UniTN. In particular, the report presents ideas and results of four lines of research: contextual requirements modeling and reasoning, commitments and goal models, developing self-reconfigurable systems, and requirements awareness

Refinement of SDBC Business Process Models Using ISDL

Aiming at aligning business process modeling and software specification, the SDBC approach considers a multi-viewpoint modeling where static, dynamic, and data business process aspect models have to be mapped adequately to corresponding static, dynamic, and data software specification aspect models. Next to that, the approach considers also a business process modeling viewpoint which concerns real-life communication and coordination issues, such as meanings, intentions, negotiations, commitments, and obligations. Hence, in order to adequately align communication and dynamic aspect models, SDBC should use at least two modeling techniques. However, the transformation between two techniques unnecessarily complicates the modeling process. Next to that, different techniques use different modeling formalisms whose reflection sometimes causes limitations. For this reason, we explore in the current paper the value which the (modeling) language ISDL could bring to SDBC in the alignment of communication and behavioral (dynamic) business process aspect models; ISDL can usefully refine dynamic process models. Thus, it is feasible to expect that ISDL can complement the SDBC approach, allowing refinement of dynamic business process aspect models, by adding communication and coordination actions. Furthermore, SDBC could benefit from ISDL-related methods assessing whether a realized refinement conforms to the original process model. Our studies in the paper are supported by an illustrative example

"The Minskyan System, Part I: Properties of the Minskyan Analysis and How to Theorize and Model a Monetary Production Economy"

This is the first part of a three-part analysis of the Minskyan framework. Via an extensive review of the literature, this paper looks at 12 essential elements necessary to get a good understanding of Minsky's theory, and argues that those elements are central to comprehend how a monetary production economy works. This paper also shows how important these 12 elements are for the modeling of the Minskyan framework, and how the omission of one of them may be detrimental to an understanding of the essential dynamics that Minsky put forward: the Financial Instability Hypothesis.

SOA-Driven Business-Software Alignment

The alignment of business processes and their supporting application software is a major concern during the initial software design phases. This paper proposes a design approach addressing this problem of business-software alignment. The approach takes an initial business model as a basis in deriving refined models that target a service-oriented software implementation. The approach explicitly identifies a software modeling level at which software modules are represented as services in a technology-platformindependent way. This model-driven service-oriented approach has the following properties: (i) there is a forced alignment (consistency) between business processes and supporting applications; (ii) changes in the business environment can be traced to the application and vice versa, via model relationships; (iii) the software modules modeled as services have a high degree of autonomy; (iv) migration to new technology platforms can be supported through the platform independent software model

Specification and Verification of Commitment-Regulated Data-Aware Multiagent Systems

In this paper we investigate multi agent systems whose agent interaction is based on social commitments that evolve over time, in presence of (possibly incomplete) data. In particular, we are interested in modeling and verifying how data maintained by the agents impact on the dynamics of such systems, and on the evolution of their commitments. This requires to lift the commitment-related conditions studied in the literature, which are typically based on propositional logics, to a first-order setting. To this purpose, we propose a rich framework for modeling data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems. In this framework, we study verification of rich temporal properties, establishing its decidability under the condition of “state-boundedness”, i.e., data items come from an infinite domain but, at every time point, each agent can store only a bounded number of them

Extend Commitment Protocols with Temporal Regulations: Why and How

The proposal of Elisa Marengo's thesis is to extend commitment protocols to explicitly account for temporal regulations. This extension will satisfy two needs: (1) it will allow representing, in a flexible and modular way, temporal regulations with a normative force, posed on the interaction, so as to represent conventions, laws and suchlike; (2) it will allow committing to complex conditions, which describe not only what will be achieved but to some extent also how. These two aspects will be deeply investigated in the proposal of a unified framework, which is part of the ongoing work and will be included in the thesis.Comment: Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium and Poster Session of the 5th International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2011@IJCAI), pages 1-8 (arXiv:1107.1686