Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The
B
OCHICA
Framework for Model-Driven
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
Stefan Warwas
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI),
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, 66123 Saarbr ucken, Germany
stefan.warwas@dfki.de
Abstract.
Modeling real world agent-based systems is a complex endeavour. An
ideal domain specific agent modeling language would be tailored to a certain ap-
plication domain (e.g. agents in virtual worlds) as well as to the target execution
environment (e.g. a virtual reality platform). This includes the use of specialized
concepts of the application domain, software languages (e.g. query languages
for reasoning about an agent's knowledge), as well as custom views and dia-
grams for designing the system. This paper presents a model-driven framework
for engineering multiagent systems, called B
OCHICA
. The framework is based
on a platform independent modeling language which covers the core concepts of
multiagent systems. In order to better close the gap between design and code,
B
OCHICA
can be extended through several extension interfaces for custom ap-
plication domains and execution environments. The framework is accompanied
by an iterative adaptation process to gradually incorporate conceptual extensions.
The approach has been evaluated at modeling agents in semantically-enriched
virtual worlds.
1
Introduction
The research field of
Agent-oriented Software Engineering
(AOSE) is concerned with
investigating how methods and algorithms developed in the wide area of
Artificial In-
telligence
(AI) can be used for engineering intelligent software agents in a systematic
way. AOSE should not be seen in isolation: As it gets increasingly applied in main
stream software engineering it is confronted (of course) with typical problems of to-
day's software development such as (i) an increasing number of software frameworks,
programming languages, and execution platforms, (ii) shorter development cycles, and
(iii) heterogeneous and distributed IT environments. A key to tackle the rapidly growing
complexity in software development is abstraction. Higher-level software languages are
required to hide the complexity and focus on the design of IT systems.
Model-driven
Software Development
(MDSD) is driven by industry needs to deal with complex soft-
ware systems. The underlying idea of MDSD is to model the
System Under Consid-
erations
(SUC) on different levels of abstractions and use model transformations to
gradually refine them until concrete code can be generated. Several core aspects of
MDSD were standardized by the
Object Management Group
(OMG) as
Model-driven
Architecture
(MDA).
This paper was partially founded by the Saarbr ucken Graduate School for Computer Science.
