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

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

A survey of agent-oriented methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusses what approaches have been followed (mainly extending existing object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey

Creating agent platforms to host agent-mediated services that share resources

After a period where the Internet was exclusively filled with content, the present efforts are moving towards services, which handle the raw information to create value from it. Therefore labors to create a wide collection of agent-based services are being perfomed in several projects, such as Agentcities does. In this work we present an architecture for agent platforms named a-Buildings. The aim of the proposed architecture is to ease the creation, installation, search and management of agent-mediated services and the share of resources among services. To do so the a-Buildings architecture creates a new level of abstraction on top of the standard FIPA agent platform specification. Basically, an a-Building is a service-oriented platform which offers a set of low level services to the agents it hosts. We define low level services as those required services that are neccesary to create more complex high level composed services.Postprint (published version

Requirements-Driven Adaptation of Choreographed Interactions

Electronic services are emerging as the de-facto enabler of interaction interoperability across organization boundaries. Cross-organizational interactions are often “choreographed”, i.e. specified by a messaging protocol from a global point of view independent of the local view of each interacting organization. Local requirements motivating an interaction as well as the global contextual requirements governing the interaction inevitably evolve over time, requiring adaptation of the corresponding interaction protocol. Adaptation of an interaction protocol must ensure the satisfaction of both sets of interaction requirements while maintaining consistency between the global view and the local views of an interaction specification. Such adaptation is not possible with the current state-of-the-art representations of choreographed interactions, as they capture only operational messaging specifications detached from both local organizational requirements as well as global contextual requirements. This thesis presents three novel contributions that tackle adaptation of choreographed interaction protocols: an automated technique for deriving an interaction protocol from requirements, a formalization of consistency between local and global views, and a framework for guiding the adaptation of a choreographed interaction. A choreographed interaction is specified using models of organizational requirements motivating the interaction. We employ the formal semantics embedded in requirements models to automatically derive an interaction protocol. We propose a framework for relating the global and local views of interaction specification and maintaining consistency between them. We develop a metamodel for interaction specification, from which we enumerate adaptation operations. We build a catalogue that provides guidance on performing each operation and propagating changes between the global and local views. These contributions are evaluated using examples from the literature as well as a real-world case study

From social machines to social protocols:Software engineering foundations for sociotechnical systems

The overarching vision of social machines is to facilitate social processes by having computers provide administrative support. We conceive of a social machine as a sociotechnical system (STS): a software-supported system in which autonomous principals such as humans and organizations interact to exchange information and services. Existing approaches for social machines emphasize the technical aspects and inadequately support the meanings of social processes, leaving them informally realized in human interactions. We posit that a fundamental rethinking is needed to incorporate accountability, essential for addressing the openness of the Web and the autonomy of its principals. We introduce Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering (IOSE) as a paradigm expressly suited to capturing the social basis of STSs. Motivated by promoting openness and autonomy, IOSE focuses not on implementation but on social protocols, specifying how social relationships, characterizing the accountability of the concerned parties, progress as they interact. Motivated by providing computational support, IOSE adopts the accountability representation to capture the meaning of a social machine’s states and transitions. We demonstrate IOSE via examples drawn from healthcare. We reinterpret the classical software engineering (SE) principles for the STS setting and show how IOSE is better suited than traditional software engineering for supporting social processes. The contribution of this paper is a new paradigm for STSs, evaluated via conceptual analysis