ABSTRACT
Multi Agent Systems have proven to be a powerful new approach for designing and developing complex and distributed software systems. Developing multi-agent systems for complex and distributed systems entails a robust methodology to assist developers to develop such systems in appropriate way. In the last ten years, many Agent Oriented Methodologies have been proposed with some shortcomings that include lack of industrial suitability, lack of standard, research problem and the problems of traditional distributed systems as well as the difficulties that arise from flexibility requirements and sophisticated interactions. This dissertation is aimed at developing an Enhanced Software Engineering Methodology for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents. The objective include: Investigate three selected agent oriented methodologies (ROADMAP, MaSE and Prometheus);Present the enhanced framework for Development of Intelligent Agent; applying the enhanced model in development of Intelligent Agent called modeling agent as a proof of concept and conduct performance evaluation of the proposed model with the existing Software Engineering Methodologies. The methodology adopted for the development of this new System is System Development Life Cycle (SDLC).The proposed system developed combined the strong point of the previous existing methodologies – ROADMAP (Role Oriented Analysis and Design for Multi-Agent Programming), MaSE (Multi-Agent Oriented System Engineering) and Prometheus, and also based on three fundamental aspects: Concepts, Models, and Process. The new methodology covers the whole life cycle of agent system development, from requirement analysis, architecture design, and detailed design to implementation. The new methodology is illustrated by a case study on an Intelligent Agent-Based Travel system using HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL were the programming languages and database employed.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Since the 1980s, agent technology has attracted an increasing amount of interest from the research and business communities (Nicholas & Wooldridge, 2012). In particular, the last decade has witnessed a steadily increasing number of different agent theories, architectures, and languages proposed in the literature. This increasing interest in agent technology is mainly due to its potential to significantly improve the development of high-quality and complex systems (Nicholas & Wooldridge, 2012). Indeed, there have been numerous agent-based applications in a wide variety of domains such as air traffic control, space exploration, information management, business process management, e-commerce, holonic manufacturing, and defence simulation (Nicholas & Wooldridge, 2012). Despite its popularity and attractiveness as a research area, agent technology still faces many challenges in being adopted by the industry and possibly taking over from objects technology as the dominant software development technology (Odell, 2012). A key area of research is Software Engineering methodology: One of the most fundamental obstacles to large-scale take-up of agent technology is the lack of mature software development methodologies for agent-based systems. (Nicholas & Wooldridge, 2012).
Indeed, the development of industrial-strength applications requires the availability of software engineering methodologies. These methodologies typically consist of a set of methods, models, and techniques that facilitate a systematic software development process, resulting in increased although many Agent Oriented methodologies have been proposed, few are mature or described insufficient detail to be of real use. None of them is in fact complete- in the sense of covering all of the necessary activities involved in the development of intelligent agents and is able to fully support the industrial needs of agent-based system development.
In addition, although a large range of agent-oriented methodologies are available; there is a lack of appropriate study on evaluation and comparison of the existing methodologies. Several
approaches have been applied to review and classify a large range of agent-oriented methodologies or perform comparisons on a small number of methodologies.
Unfortunately, such evaluations or comparisons are mostly subjective and are solely based on inputs from a single assessor (or group of assessors).
Furthermore, numerous key issues relating to software engineering generally and the agent- oriented paradigm specifically are not addressed in those studies. We believe that the area of agent-oriented methodologies is growing rapidly and that the time has come to begin drawing together the work from various research groups with the aim of developing the next generation of agent-oriented methodology.
A crucial step is to understand the relationship between various key methodologies, including each methodology’s strengths, weaknesses, and domain of applicability. An important part of this step is also identifying the key commonalities and differences among the existing agent- oriented methodologies. By doing so, we may contribute towards building a unified approach to agent oriented software development.
Many diverse Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) approaches and methodologies have been proposed (Jayaratna, 2012). Each of the methodologies has different strengths and weaknesses, and different specialized features to support different aspects of their intended application domains. Clearly no single methodology is “one size fits all. However, as application complexity grows, we expect future projects to have an increasingly large number of aspects that cannot be addressed by a single methodology alone. To provide engineering support for such projects, specialized features to address different aspects must be brought together from different methodologies in a consistent fashion.
It is useful to identify and standardize the common elements of the existing methodologies. The common elements could form a generic agent model on which specialized features might be based. The remaining parts of the methodologies would represent “added-value” that the methodologies bring to the common elements, and should be “componentized” into modular features. The small granularity of features allows them to be combined into the common models in a flexible manner. By conforming to the generic agent model in the common elements, we expect the semantics of the optional features to remain consistent.
In Agent Technology, individual agent-oriented methodologies are useful for restricted situations, a more flexible approach can be found in the use of an enhanced model. Using an underpinning Meta model, a repository of method fragments can be built up and, from this, a selected number of fragments can be abstracted to form an organization-specific or project specific methodology. Hybrid agent oriented methodology for intelligent agent system will be created from existing individual agent oriented methodologies, such as Prometheus, is demonstrated with further enhancements from other methodologies such as ROADMAP. Enhanced Multi-Agent System Development (EMASD) methodology, consisting of the common elements identified from MaSE, Prometheus and ROADMAP.
1.2 The Statement of Problem
The multiplicity and variety of a g e n t o r i e n t e d methodologies result in t h e following problems:
Most of the research that examined and compared properties of agent-oriented methodologies suggested that none were completely suitable for industrial development of multi-agent systems (Tran and Law, 2010).Therefore, selecting methodology for developing an agent- based system/application becomes a trivial task, in particular or industrial developers which hold specific requirements and constraints.
None of the existing agent-oriented methodologies has itself established as a standard nor have they been commonly accepted (Tran and Law, 2010). As long as there are no standard definitions of an agent, agent architecture, or an agent language, we could think that the existing methodologies will only be used by individual researchers to program their agent- based application using their own agent language, architectures, and theories. The lack of standard agent architectures and agent programming languages is actually the main problem to define models and put them into operation, or providing a useful “standard” code generation. Since there is no standard agent architecture, the design of the agents needs to be customized to each agent architecture. Nevertheless, the analysis models are independent of the agent architectures. They describe what the agent-based system has to do, but not how this is done (Iglesias, 2012). Most of the existing methodologies suffer from a gap between the design models and the existing implementation languages (Scott, 2012).
It is difficult for a programmer to map the developed complex design models onto an implementation. To close this gap, a methodology should either provide refined design models that can be directly implemented in an available programming language or use a dedicated agent-oriented programming language which provides constructs to implement the high-level design concepts.
Most of the existing methodologies do not include an implementation phase. Methodologies that include an implementation phase as an essential phase of its methodology, such as the Tropos methodology, provide an explicit implementation language. This implementation language however does not explain how to implement reasoning about beliefs, goals, plans and reasoning of communication (Scott, 2011).
This leads to difficulties using the methodology. The implementation phase should describe in detail how the belief, goals, plans, and interactions are to be implemented using a specific agent programming language.
One important characteristic of agent behaviour is that the agent may play one or several roles in the system. A few of the existing methodologies support role concept. None of them takes into account that an agent may play more than one role in a system (Rumbaugh, 2011). This aspect gives the agent more flexibility and the ability to complete the work mandated. The agent can benefit from combining the goals and plans for the roles played by the agent and the latter can be exploited to carry out its work in the system.
Therefore, all of the above stated problems provide us with a motivation to come up with a novel approach for development of Intelligent Agents.
1.3 Aim and Objectives of the Study.
The aim of this study is to develop an Enhanced Software Engineering Methodology for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents.
Specific objectives of the study include:
- Investigate three prominent agent-oriented methodologies.
- Present the enhanced framework for the Development of Intelligent Agents.
- Apply the enhanced model in developing an Intelligent Agent called modeling agent as a proof of concept.
- Conduct Performance evaluation of the proposed model with existing Software Engineering Methodology.
1.4 Significance of the Study
The potential of agent-based systems is large and it remains to exploit this new technology. The success of agent-based systems in the future, in contrast, in our view depends on a thorough analysis of its conceptual basis and the construction of structuring principles and methods for the design of agent systems (Lin & Winkoff, 2012).Despite the many proposals in the literature to support the construction and design of agents by means of specific agent architectures or programming languages. (Lin & Winkoff, 2012). Some promising efforts in providing a methodology for agent-oriented software engineering derived from object-oriented methodologies have been proposed (Booch, 2014).
Furthermore, a Traveller Agent System was developed in this research work using the developed enhanced model. Based on an observation that the coalescence of groups of Object Oriented methodologies in the late 1990s led to an increased take-up by industry of the object- oriented paradigm for system development and project management, this research aims to encourage first the coalescence and collaboration between research groups and then, hopefully, more rapid industry adoption of Agent Oriented methodological approaches (Lin & Winkoff, 2012).
Moreover, the significance of this research work cover the identification of those predominant and tested AO methodologies, characterize them, analyze them, and seek some method of unification and consolidation with the hope that, in so doing, the community of scholars supporting Agent Oriented methodologies will soon be able to transfer those innovative ideas into industry acceptance. The importance and value of this research lies in its inherent abilities to conveniently, effectively and efficiently develop a One-Size-fits-all methodology for intelligent agent. Software integration such as the intelligent agent systems is package that is implemented to provide search engine, process data and transfer it to where it will use. It can also help researchers to examine the similarity and the differences among existing agent- oriented methodologies and to analyze the needed attributes of such methodologies. Additionally, setting a scale for grading agent-oriented methodologies, and using the scale in
conjunction with our framework, may result in a selection of the better methodologies, gradually reducing their number (Wooldridge,2012). This selection may eventually converge to a small set of the most- fit agent-oriented methodologies, possibly leading to standardization.
1.5 Scope of the Study.
This study is meant to cover the following individual agent-oriented methodologies MaSE, ROADMAP, and Prometheus that are restricted to specific domains and provide means for addressing these problems by developing an enhanced model. This comparism and evaluation frame work may be used by organizations to select a methodology for developing agent-based applications. Such an evaluation would ideally be carried out using a complete framework via different evaluation methods such as feature analysis, structured analysis, etc. Therefore, we try to construct a framework that is complete in the sense that it can be used to fulfill our purposes. It is also important that the evaluation is as objective as possible.
Furthermore, the Enhanced Multi-Agent System Development (EMASD) methodology is designed to work for cross-boundary systems (semi- open systems) where the agent society itself is closed (i.e. the types and behaviours of agents defined in the system are determined beforehand) but external agents may interact with members of the society via the defined and used protocols. Enhanced Multi-Agent System Development (EMASD) methodology is focused on small and medium sized systems which are based on the BDI agent architecture, which is used to design agents for the development process.
Moreover, this methodology follows the traditional top-down approach that starts by identifying the system requirements and ends up by implementing the system
1.6 Limitations of the Study.
Some of the constraints that may have in one way or another affected the outcome of this work include:
The difficulty in obtaining a complete evaluation framework in practice. We tried to construct a framework that is complete in the sense that it can be used to fulfill our purposes. It is also
important that the evaluation is as objective as possible. This means that the results of the evaluation reflect a wide range of viewpoints.
1.7 Definition of terms.
- Agent: One that is authorized to act for another. Agents possess the characteristics of delegacy, competency, and amenability.
- Information Society (IS) – A country or region where information technology has been fully exploited and is part of everyday life as an enabler of information sharing, communication and diffusion.
- Information Technology (IT) – Embraces the use of computers, telecommunications and office systems technologies for the collection, processing, storing, packaging and dissemination of information.
- Internet Exchange Point (IXP) – It is a “peering point” for Interconnecting ISPs and/or other IXPs for the purpose of localizing national traffic routing as opposed to using international routes to accomplish Inter-ISP traffic flow.
- Internet Service Provider (ISP) – Also known as Internet Access Providers – Is a company that provides infrastructure for access to the Internet or for interconnecting other ISPs and content-based or application-based services on the Internet.
- Knowledge Based Economy (KBE) – A country or region where ICT is extensively used to enhance knowledge so that higher human capital brings further improvement to the economy.
- Delegacy: Discretionary authority to autonomously act on behalf of the client. Actions include making decisions, committing resources, and performing tasks (Lin & Winkoff, 2012)
- Competency: The capability to effectively manipulate the problem domain environment to accomplish the prerequisite tasks. Competency includes specialized communication proficiency (Lin & Winkoff, 2012).
- Amenability: The ability to adapt behavior to optimize performance in an often non- stationary environment in responsive pursuit of the goals of the client. Amenability may be combined with accountability (Lin & Winkoff, 2012).
This material content is developed to serve as a GUIDE for students to conduct academic research
DEVELOPMENT OF AN ENHANCED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING METHODOLOGY FOR ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS
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