Social-oriented engineering of intelligent software

Abstract

In the last few years, software applications are increased in complexity and in stakeholders' expectations, principally due to new Internet-centric application areas such as eBusiness, eGovernment, web services, ubiquitous computing, and peer-to-peer networks. From a software engineering point of view, such applications have brought in new challenging requirements to deal with. Therefore, the paper aims to cope with complex system development taking benefit from the use of an agent oriented software engineering methodology, named Tropos. The paper focuses both on the socially-driven approach of Tropos and on the agent capabilities characterization, in order to build up an agent-based information system prototype. Specifically, we revise and improve the Tropos architectural design phase, motivating the need for two correlated dimensions: organization styles based macro-level architectural design and social patterns based micro-level architectural design. Moreover, we illustrate how the architectural design phase drives and supports detailed design activities, e.g., agent cooperation, by means of some agent specification abstractions.