Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology

By Franco Zambonelli, Nicholas R. Jennings, Michael J. Wooldridge. TSEM, 2003

1,428 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based computing as they pertain to agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, we argue that a multiagent system can naturally be viewed and architected as a computational organization, and we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems. Second, we detail and extend the Gaia methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Gaia exploits the aforementioned organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open software systems. Two representative case studies are introduced to exemplify Gaia's concepts and to show its use and effectiveness in different types of multiagent system.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d0cd8df800b6f13e4808e722aa3c9864b0f2dc8

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Citations in the corpus

Agent-based systems for manufacturing (2006, neutral): “ment [189].”
Artifacts in the A&A meta-model for multi-agent systems (2008, background): “While early AOSE methodologies were mostly devoted to the engineering of individual agents, later developments put rather the focus on system issues like organisation [72], interaction [36], self-organisation [4], environment [68], and so on.”
Environment as a first class abstraction in multiagent systems (2007, background): “From an organizational perspective, a MAS can naturally be considered and designed as a computational organization [91] that defines a framework for agent activities.”
The PASSI and Agile PASSI MAS Meta-models Compared with a Unifying Proposal (2005, methodology): “From all of this descends that a design process based on PASSI is performed through a sequence of steps leading from an early identification of agents to the definition of their roles and the description of their communications, while for instance in Gaia[ 15 ], being different the definitions of ag”
Environments for Multiagent Systems State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges (2004, methodology): “To our knowledge, the only methodology for analysis and design of MASs that considers the environment as a primary abstraction is the extended version of Gaia described in [94].”
AMELI: an agent-based middleware for electronic institutions (2004, background): “Recently, a remarkable number of MAS methodologies (e.g. GAIA [11], Tropos [6], or [9] to name a few) have been proposed.”
Knowledge Networks (2005, background): “The knowledge plane is populated by heavyweight intelligent agents [ZamJW03], managing and exchanging knowledge about the current state of the network, and that directly enact forms of control over both network and application components.”
Using ASEME Methodology for Model-Driven Agent Systems Development (2010, methodology): “Thus, we defined the SRM model based on the Gaia Role model [34].”
Social Roles and their Descriptions (2004, background): “In (Zambonelli et al. 2003) a role is viewed as an " abstract description of an entity's expected function " which is defined by four attributes: responsibilities (that determine the functionality of the role), permissions, activities, and protocols.”