MultiAgent System Development through SociallyBased Design

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Multi-Agent System Development through
Socially-Based Design
presenter Loris Penserini
(penserini_at_itc.it)
(http//www.inform.unian.it/pense/pense.htm)
A joint work with
Prof. Manuel Kolp University of Louvain
(BE) Prof. Maurizio Panti, Prof. Luca Spalazzi
Università Politecnica delle Marche (IT) Prof.
John Mylopoulos University of Toronto (CA)
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Introduction
Motivation
New application areas such as eBusiness, web
services, ubiquitous computing, and peer-to-peer
networks are responsible of new requirements in
software development.
Goals
A new software design methodology is needed, that
is able to analyze the problem with a higher
abstraction level allowing to reduce and easily
manage the system complexity at design time.
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The Research Direction
Several projects have proposed a general
methodology for analyzing and designing
multi-agent systems, e.g., MaSE DeLoach et al.,
2001, Gaia Wooldridge et al., 2000, Tropos
Castro et al., 2002, and other proposals
described in Iglesias et al., 1998 and Caire
et al., 2002.
Tropos seems to be stronger in requirements
analysis and component reusability. In
particular, requirement analysis in Tropos
attempts to characterize the social settings of
the system to be Kolp et al., 2003. This
setting is then used to generate and analyze
architectural and detail design.
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Talk Overview

• - The Application Domain
• System Architectural Design
• MAS Detail Design
• -- The Information System Manager
• - Challenges Detail Design needs to address
  agent specifications
• - Conclusions and future directions

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The Application Domain
We must develop a multi-agent system to support
the two principal supply chain management network
typologies vertical and horizontal.
In our MAS prototype (e.g., Penserini et al.,
2002), for the sake of simplicity, we assume
that every time an order occurs, the related
enterprise can satisfy it in three principal
ways a) using its internal stock, b) negotiating
the quantity/lot required with the known
partners, and c) trying to seek for new partners.
Notice that, if every partner has the same MAS,
the (c) scenario forces the system-to-be to
support a peer-to-peer computing model.
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The Application Domain
Some Requirements

• The MAS has to manage the three kinds of
  collaboration according to its internal stock
  status
• The MAS has not to substitute the enterprises
  information system, on the contrary it has to
  interface it
• The MAS has to allow the enterprise to
  collaborate even with partners never known in the
  past
• Each MAS have to be able to collaborate with
  other MAS to support both horizontal and vertical
  supply chain network.

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System Architectural Design
The Architectural Design, in Tropos, is conduct
by the use of organizational styles Kolp et al.,
2001 Kolp et al., 2003
Fig. 1 A MAS architecture based on the
organizational joint venture style
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Detail Design
According to the methodology, we have used social
patterns that are design patterns that capture
social and intentional aspects that are recurrent
in multi-agent or cooperative systems.
Fig. 2 the Information Source Manager
architecture as a mediator agent pattern
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Detail Design the Agent Rational
In this phase, we aim to figure out each agents
main capabilities required to achieve the
intentions identified by social patterns.

• For example, the mediator agent will need to be
  able to (e.g., see Panti et al., 2001 and
  Penserini et al., 2002 for details)
• interpret the initiators request-message to
  correctly extrapolate the query
• reformulate the query according to its local
  knowledge
• cooperate with other agents to satisfy requests
  and to overcome failures
• integrate the querys components returned by
  partners, e.g., distributed and heterogeneous
  wrappers.

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Detail Design agent specifications
Agent specifications are required in order to
characterize the principal agents capabilities.
For example

• Agent interactions are often based on an
  instant-messaging communication model inspired to
  the speech act theory FIPA-ACL or KQML/KIF?
• The detail-design methodology needs to allow the
  designer for the agents knowledge base
  characterization a BDI architecture? What
  language for the ontology definition?
• Each agent often demands to cope with the
  internal/local inability to satisfy a request by
  means of agent cooperation ability.
• Often agent needs to collect distributed
  information in a single and coherent answer to
  cope with integration issues.

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Detail Design the mediator intentional analysis
In order to characterize the mediators
capabilities Panti et al., 2001, we exploit the
i Strategic Rational model features Yu, 1995.
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Conclusions
This work presents an example of MAS development
emphasizing the need for organizational and
social abstractions to better capture the
architectural design aspects.
The work outlines some weaknesses in the late
phases of the Tropos detail design we need to
encapsulate some agent specifications in the
methodology.
As future work, we are improving the
methodologies focusing on architectural and
detail design issues.
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Some References
Caire et al., 2002 G. Caire, F. Garijo, J.
Gomez, J. Pavon, E. Vargas, Agent-oriented
analysis using Message/UMLl, in Proc. of the 2nd
International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software
Engineering, Vol. 2222 of LNCS, Springer
2002. Castro et al, 2002 J. Castro, M. Kolp and
J. Mylopoulos, Towards Requirements-Driven
Information Systems Engineering The Tropos
Project, in Information Systems, Vol. 27,
Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 365-389,
2002. DeLoach et al., 2001 S.A. DeLoach, and C.
Sparkman, Multiagent system engineering,
International Journal of Software Engineering and
Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp.
231-258, 2001. Iglesias et al., 1998 C.
Iglesias, M. Garrijo and J. Gonzalez, A Survey
of Agent-Oriented Methodologies, Proceedings of
the 5th International Workshop on Intelligent
Agents Agent Theories, Architectures, and
Languages (ATAL-1998), pp. 317-330, Paris,
France, July 1998. Kolp et al., 2001 M. Kolp,
P. Giorgini and J. Mylopoulos. A Goal-Based
Organizational Perspective on Multi-Agents
Architectures, Proceedings of the Eighth
International Workshop on Agent Theories,
architectures, and languages (ATAL-2001),
Seattle, USA, August 1-3, 2001. Kolp et al.,
2003 M. Kolp, P. Giorgini and J. Mylopoulos,
Organizational Patterns for Early Requirements
Analysis, Proc. of the 15th Int. Conf. on
Advanced Information Systems Engineering
(CAiSE'03), Velden, Austria, June 2003.
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Some References
Panti et al., 2001 M. Panti, L. Spalazzi, L.
Penserini, Cooperation Strategies for
Information Integration, in Proc. of the Sixth
Int. Conference on Cooperative Information
Systems (CoopIS), Springer Verlag, pp 123-134,
Trento, Italy, Sep 2001. Penserini et al., 2002
Penserini, L., Lin, L., Mylopoulos, J., Panti,
M., Spalazzi, L. Cooperation Strategies for
Agent-Based P2P Systems. Accepted in WIAS Web
Intelligence and Agent Systems An International
Journal, Publisher IOS Press, ISSN 1570-1263,
2002. Wooldridge et al., 2000 M. Wooldridge,
N.R. Jennings, and D. Kinny, The Gaia
Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and
Design, in Journal of Autonomous Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems, 3(3)285-312, 2000. Yu,
1995 E. Yu, Modeling Strategic Relationships for
Process Reengineering, Ph.D. thesis, Department
of Computer Science, University of Toronto,
Canada, 1995.