Using Intelligent Agents to Build E-Business Software

Agent architectures are gaining popularity for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by e-commerce applications. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining patterns and languages for agent architectural design. This paper proposes a modern approach based on organizational structures and architectural description languages to define and specify agent architectures notably in the case of e-commerce system design

Développement de patrons de conception à ancrage social pour architectures multi-agent

La croissance explosive des domaines d'application tels que le commerce électronique, la gestion des connaissances, les systèmes coopératifs, l’informatique point-à-point, mobile ou cognitive change profondément et irréversiblement nos vues sur l’ingénierie logicielle et les systèmes eux-mêmes. Ceux-ci doivent maintenant supporter des architectures ouvertes pouvant évoluer continuellement afin d’intégrer, modifier ou retirer des composants nouveaux ou existants devant répondre aux exigences et conditions changeantes de l’environnement. Pour ces raisons – et d’autres – le paradigme orienté agent gagne en popularité sur les techniques traditionnelles de développement logiciel, y compris celles dites structurées et orienté objet. Ce genre de systèmes et technologies demande des méthodologies adaptées. Tropos est une méthodologie d’analyse et de conception de systèmes agent. Elle propose une ontologie socio-intentionnelle basée sur trois niveaux : 1) éléments atomiques de base, 2) patron de conception à ancrage social, 3) styles organisationnels. Ce travail se focalise sur le deuxième niveau. Il identifie des patrons de conception à ancrage social à utiliser dans Tropos, en développe certains (appel d’offre, mise au enchères et courtier) sur l’environnement de programmation agent JACK en utilisant le modèle théorique BDI et en tenant compte des spécifications FIPA

Multi-Agent Spiral Software Engineering: A Lakatosian Approach

This paper presents an epistemological approach for the development and validation of an original agent oriented software development methodology (see [Wautelet05a, Wautelet05b]). Agent orientation has been widely presented as a new modeling, design and programming paradigm that could be adopted to build systems mark to the determinant advantages it offers. This will be exposed and put into perspective in the paper through the Lakatosian approach. Spiral development (see [Boehm00a]) has become popular, especially through object-oriented software project development since it allows efficient software project management, continuous organizational modeling and requirements acquisition, early implementation, continuous testing and modularity, etc. The iterative nature of this requirements engineering process will be studied here through Herbert Simon's bounded rationality principle and Popper's knowledge growth principle but nuanced by Lakatos falsification principle criticism

An Architectural Description Language for Secure Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity for building open, distributed, and evolving information systems. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in the fields of software architecture and MAS during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at defining languages for designing and formalising secure agent architectures. This paper proposes a novel Architectural Description Language (ADL) for describing Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) secure MAS. We specify each element of our ADL using the Z specification language and we employ two example case studies: one to assist us in the description of the proposed language and help readers of the article to better understand the fundamentals of the language; and one to demonstrate its applicability

A Secure Architectural Description Language for Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems are now being considered a promising architectural approach for building Internet-based applications. One of the most critical and important aspects of software deployed on the web has always been the security of their architectures. However, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining languages for designing and formalizing agent architectures and more specifically secure ones. This paper identifies the foundations for an architectural description language (ADL) to specify secure multi-agent systems. We propose a set of system design primitives and conceptualize it with the Z specification language to capture a "core" architectural model to build secure MAS architectures. We apply it on an e-commerce example to illustrate our proposal

Reasoning About Willingness in Networks of Agents

The i* Strategic Dependency model has been successfully employed to analyze trust relationships of networks of agents during the early stages of multiagent systems development. However, the model only supports limited trust reasoning due to its limitation to deal with the vulnerability of the depender regarding the failure of the dependency. In this paper, we introduce the concept of willingness, which provides a solution to the above problem and therefore allows a more complete analysis and reasoning of trust relationships in networks of agents

Delegation Mechanisms for Agent Architectural Design

Multi-agent Systems (MAS) are now being considered a promising architectural approach for designing collaborative information systems. In such a perspective, the concept of delegation has often been considered as a key concept for modeling cooperative behavior in MAS. However, despite considerable work on delegation mechanisms in MAS, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining a delegation model for designing MAS. This paper deals with this issue in defining the foundations for a delegation model aimed to help developers during the phase of designing collaborative MAS

1 Agent-based IT support for Knowledge Management

psychological and business management issues. A KM effort can always only be successful, if a holistic perspective is taken. By taking a holistic perspective on KM IT support, we identify a number of core services and components of a KM IT support system. The identified components are organized into an IT framework. In this paper, we propose software agent technology as the key paradigm for that framework proposal. One central service in that proposal, the ontology service, is considered in detail. Among other issues, creation, application and representation of ontologies in the framework are explored and areas for future research are identified