Towards Agent-Oriented Specification of Information Systems

Objects in information systems usually have a very long life-span. Therefore, it often happens that during the life of an object external requirements are changing, e.g. changes of laws. Such changes often require the object to adopt another behavior. In consequence, it is necessary to get a grasp of dynamically changing object behavior. Unfortunately, not all possible changes can in general be taken into account in advance at specification time. Hence, current object specification approaches cannot deal with this problem. Flexible extensions of object specification are needed to capture such situations. The concept of agent which can be seen as a further development of the concept of object seems to provide a more adequate basis for modeling such information system dynamics. In comparison to traditional objects, agents are flexible in that sense they may change their behavior dynamically during system run-time, i.e. the behavior of an agent is not (or can not be) completely determine..