Methodologies for agent systems development: underlying assumptions and implications for design

Article Free Access Share on Agent system development method based on agent patterns Authors: Yasuyuki Tahara Systems and Software Research Laboratories, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corp., 70 Yanagi-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki, 210-8501, Japan Systems and Software Research Laboratories, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corp., 70 Yanagi-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki, 210-8501, JapanView Profile , Akihiko Ohsuga Systems and Software Research Laboratories, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corp., 70 Yanagi-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki, 210-8501, Japan Systems and Software Research Laboratories, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corp., 70 Yanagi-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki, 210-8501, JapanView Profile , Shinichi Honiden Systems and Software Research Laboratories, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corp., 70 Yanagi-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki, 210-8501, Japan Systems and Software Research Laboratories, Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corp., 70 Yanagi-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki, 210-8501, JapanView Profile Authors Info & Claims ICSE '99: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineeringMay 1999 Pages 356–367https://doi.org/10.1145/302405.302657Online:16 May 1999Publication History 41citation891DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations41Total Downloads891Last 12 Months4Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Using agent development tools to construct an agent-based system is a popular approach. However, the developed agent system might not be feasible due to certain mutual conflicted rules stored in various agents. Currently, the development tools do not have the function to check the feasibility about the workflow of the agent system during it implementation stage. Therefore, in this research, a Petri Net (PN) based evaluation approach was developed. There were three stages in the proposed system. In the conceptual stage, the pitfall of the current agent system developing process was examined and an improvement analysis process was specified. Then, in the system design stage, an evaluation approach which extracted the process log file from a developing agent system into a PN model in terms of a process mining approach-α algorithm was proposed. This model was simulated in a PN simulation package. The agent system performance was evaluated in terms of analyzing the deadlock phenomena of the PN model. Finally, in the implementation stage, the proposed concept was implemented by using an agent developing tool JADE and a PN simulation tool CPN. An agent-based robotic assembly system was used to examine the possible deadlock of the agent system.KeywordsAgent SystemBase Evaluation ApproachProcess Mining ApproachAgent System PerformanceMessage FileThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Since today's enterprises must constantly adapt to rapidly changing external environment, it is necessary to be able to deal with variation and changing conditions in information systems (IS) development. This may be achieved by the use of multifractal IS development methodologies. Fractal approaches to some extent have already been tested in adaptive enterprise development, adaptive manufacturing systems development, and software development. This suggests that multifractal IS development, on the one hand, is appropriate, because the information system should properly reflect the business enterprise (in this case a fractal one) and, on the other hand, it is possible, because some elements of it have already been implemented. Development of multifractal IS aims at managing relative completeness by relative simplicity that has to be discovered in different subsystems that influence the development of the information system. This, in essence, implies the need of thorough analysis an understanding of business structures and processes to discover patterns useful for the identification of fractal features. Currently, only some guidelines for development of multifractal IS are derived from reported experiences of fractal systems development and the use of fractal approaches in other domains.

Research Context: User satisfaction is recognized as a key success criterion in Information Systems (IS) projects. In the IS project context, continuously monitoring this criterion throughout the project lifecycle can reduce training and rework costs, enhance user experience, and prevent client loss. Scientific and/or Practical Problem: Despite its relevance, there is a lack of methods in the IS project management literature to evaluate user satisfaction during the development cycle. Existing approaches focus mainly on end-stage evaluations, limiting timely adjustments and evidence-based decision-making during project execution. Proposed Solution and/or Analysis: This paper proposes a framework for assessing user satisfaction in IS projects through three stages: expectation elicitation, expert inspection, and post-use verification. All stages are supported by questionnaires derived from usability heuristics to guide structured evaluation and comparison. Related IS Theory: The study is grounded in the Information Systems Success Model, which identifies user satisfaction as an essential dimension of project success, and integrates principles from Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Research Method: An exploratory review of relevant literature was conducted, followed by the design of the proposed framework and its validation through three instrumental case studies across different organizational domains. Summary of Results: The results indicate that the proposed framework enables the evaluation of user satisfaction during system development, allowing early identification of usability issues and improvement opportunities. Contributions and Impact to the IS Area: This work contributes to IS project success management by operationalizing user satisfaction as a continuous and measurable criterion, ensuring its systematic verification throughout the project lifecycle and providing managers with a practical tool for evidence-based decision support.

Sutirtha Chatterjee) join the editor-in-chief (Robert Davison) to craft a position statement regarding the ISJ's view on theory. It is applicable, with sensitivity, to the empirical research articles that we consider for publication.

In this paper, we propose an agent system that controls multiple mobile robots. We describe the agent system as well as an example multi-robot system as an application of this agent system. The aim of the multi-robot system is providing efficient searches for a given target. Therefore, it is necessary to mutually communicate and cooperate among robots. Taking account of the delay of communication, cost, fault tolerance, and robustness, we have chosen mobile agent system for the information transmission method. We have also chosen ad-hoc method for the communication mode, where each robot communicates directly without going through the Internet. Even though agent systems are often implemented using Java language or Python language, we have chosen C++ language for developing our agent system with the hope for gaining performance efficiency. We have modularized each function and it does not depend on other modules. We have shown the feasibility of our multi-agent system by applying the system to a multi-robot system that implement particle swarm optimization.

The development of cognitive agent systems relies on theories of agency, within which the concept of desire is key. Indeed, in the quest to develop increasingly autonomous cognitive agent systems, desire has had a significant role. We argue, however, that insufficient attention has been given to analysis and clarification of desire as a complex concept. Accordingly, in this paper, we will draw on some key philosophical accounts of the nature of desire, including what distinguishes it from other mental and motivational states, in order to identify some key characteristics of desire as a complex concept. We will then draw on these in order to investigate the role, definition and adequacy of concepts of desire within applied theoretical models of agency and agent systems.

We propose a new wearable agent, “FinU (Friend in You),” based on the hypothesis that inducing social facilitation effect, i.e., the effect of having other agents around to increase the task performance, is possible, even for wearable agents with a single sensory modality, by establishing beliefs about the agent in advance. Our agent system, FinU, consists of two devices: FinU-Box, a box-shaped device that synchronizes visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli to represent an agent living on the user's hand, and the FinU-Band, a wearable device worn on the hand with a sensory modality limited to tactile stimuli. In this study, in addition to the development of the system, we also conducted preliminarily evaluation by dividing the participants into two experimental conditions: one in which subjects interacted with the agent using the FinU-Box beforehand, and one in which participants did not use the FinU-Band. By having the user learn beliefs about the agent from the FinU-Box, it was expected that the user would attribute higher presence to the agent than if they had not learned beliefs. Participants were then tested on a continuous performance task to measure the effect of social facilitation, which was expected to improve performance, and their performance was compared across conditions. We assumed that higher performance indicated a stronger sense of agent presence. The results showed that the social facilitation effect was stronger for participants who had experienced the FinU-Box beforehand, as they responded more accurately to the task stimuli. This suggests that our system, which combining a device that presents a rich sensory experience with a wearable device that presents a single sensory experience would allow the agent's presence to be more strongly felt by the user.

An approach intended to fill in the gap between the existing Object Analysis and Design (OAD) methods applying mostly top-down technique and the demand of the middleware architectures (OMG CORBA) for the information system development based on composition of pre-existing interoperating components is discussed. An overview of the SYNTHESIS method for component-based interoperable information systems design is presented. The heuristic procedure for the most common reduct construction for a pair of ontologically relevant type specifications is outlined. The refinement property of the common reduct leads to a justifiable identification of reusable component fragments. The process of design is based on such identification driven by ontologically relevant pairs of types. The common reducts discovered are composed further to construct specifications serving as concretizations of the required types. The structure and functions of the design tool supporting the SYNTHESIS method and a process of design under the tool are considered.Keywordscomponent-based information system developmentinteroperable systems

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Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are sometimes still considered with an attitude of reserve by most practitioners in Computational Intelligence (CI), much more, some of them even considering this emergent computing paradigm to be in an infancy stage. Recently, however, a lot of basic models and algorithms based on components of the artificial immune-based systems have been developed and are used in a variety of applications. Further on, the focusing of Computational Intelligence on the emerging field of the AIS led to very effective hybrid intelligent systems of AIS with other CI paradigms. This tutorial will present why AIS are of interest, starting from the real- world of applications asking for a radical change of the information systems framework. The component-based framework is replaced with an agent- based one, where the system complexity requires that any agent be clearly featured by its autonomy. The AIS methods build adaptive large-scale multi- agent systems that are open to the environment, systems that are not at all fixed just after the design phase, but are real-time adaptive to unpredictable situations and malicious defects. The AIS perform the defence of a complex system against malicious defects achieving its survival strategy by extension of the concept of organization of multicellular organisms to the information systems. The main behavioural features of the AIS - as self-maintenance, distributed and adaptive computational systems - are defined and described in relation to the Immune System as an information system. A comparison of the AIS methodology with other Intelligent Technologies is another point of the tutorial. The overview of some actual AIS applications is made using a practical engineering design strategy that views AIS as very effective software with agent-based architecture.

The Relevance of Systems Methodologies in the Development of Organizational Systems The relationship between systems development and systems methodologies is discussed in this paper. As the measure of system development on the macro level, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is assumed to be the consequence of systems Research and Development (R&D), which is estimated indirectly by the number of published articles in the last 40 years. It was supposed that profit and governmental organizations are systems comprised of Production, Management and Information Systems (IS), and that their quality performance is related with its income generation, which in the future would impact the overall GDP of a country. Under such view, we also assume that such organizational processes are qualitatively improved by the application of knowledge generated by research publications, and in this study, we research for the specific case of the Systems Approach (SA), Systems Engineering (SE), Operational Research (OR), Information Systems Development (ISD) and Simulation, as the research topics for coping with organizational improvement. We looked for the articles containing the afore-mentioned variables as topic keywords, which indicate sufficient correlations with GDP and carrying information on sustainable development. We found a positive trend in the evolution of research methodologies, such as SE, ISD and OR, towards a Systems Approach and Simulation as a holistic methodology. As a result, we have proved the dynamic hypothesis of a high correlation between GDP of Top 10 + Slovenia and R&D expressed by the above-mentioned variables.

Monitoring the runtime behaviour of a distributed agent system for debugging or demonstration purposes provides a challenge to agent system developers. As a lot of the components in such a system are possibly executed on several different physical systems, maintaining an overview over the complete environment is extremely difficult. Methods taken from the development of monolithic software projects such as log files, debug outputs or step-by-step execution of a program do not easily translate to these scenarios due to the distributed nature of the system. In this paper we describe our concept for a graphical monitoring and management tool “ASGARD” (Advanced Structured Graphical Agent Realm Display), which provides an easy-to-use and intuitively understandable method for monitoring and demonstrating Multi Agent System Infrastructures. ASGARD provides a graphical representation of the connected systems using a 3D visualization. The very promising results from empirical evaluation show that an administrator’s overview over such MAS at runtime is vastly improved.

However persuasive the materials presented thus far in this book, and however well developed the conceptual underpinning of systems development is, this is a field that is characterized by a clear feeling of anxiety about the quality and appropriateness of its practice. Even if we are convinced of the merits of a certain approach, we need to know how to translate it into actual day-to-day working practices in the thousands of organizations across the country that need to develop computer-based information systems. Translating theories and models into detailed prescriptions and sequences of actions for the employees of these organizations to follow is a non-trivial task. In the last decade the most common answer to this question has been a widespread acceptance of the need for more or less comprehensive and detailed descriptions of how to develop information systems, in general described as information systems development methodologies. The word methodology would seem to imply a prescription of how to get something done, and thus methodologies for information systems development are expected to describe how the overall task is to be achieved. Following that sense, methodologies are in general normative and prescriptive, providing detailed guidelines for systems development activities; but we need also to recognize their analytical characteristic too. In stating what should be done, a methodology also implies how a problem area will be investigated and understood. We should also note here the usual caveat that writers in this field offer.

The rise of the Internet and the growth of distributed computing have led to a major paradigm shift in software engineering and computer science. Until recently, the notion of computation has been variously construed as numerical calculation, as information processing, or as intelligent symbol analysis, but increasingly, it is now viewed as distributed cognition and interaction between intelligent entities [60]. This new view has major implications for the conceptualization, design, engineering and control of software systems, most profoundly expressed in the concept of systems of intelligent software agents, or multi-agent systems [99]. Agents are software entities with control over their own execution; the design of such agents, and of multi-agent systems of them, presents major research and software engineering challenges to computer scientists. One key challenge is the design of means of communication between intelligent agents. Considerable research effort has been expended on the design of artificial languages for agent communications, such as DARPA’s Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML) [33] and the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents’ (now IEEE FIPA) Agent Communications Language (FIPA ACL) [35]. These languages, and languages like them, have been designed to be widely applicable. As well as being a strength, this feature can also be a weakness: agents participating in conversations have too many choices of what to utter at each turn, and thus agent dialogues may endure a state-space explosion. Allowing sufficient flexibility of expression while avoiding state-space explosion had led agent communications researchers to the study of formal dialogue games; these are rule-governed interactions between two or more players (or agents), where