Towards Maturity of the PASSI Process

Introduction The PASSI2 design process is the evolution of PASSI (Process for Agent Society Specification and Implementation) [44], it covers all the phases from the requirements analysis to the deployment configuration, coding, and testing. PASSI2, so as PASSI and all its evolution, is based on a meta-model describing the elements that constitute the system to be designed (agents, tasks, communications, roles) and what are the relationships among them. The importance of this description is in the lack of an universally accepted meta-model of MASs (differently from object oriented systems) that makes unclear any agent design process that does not precisely define the structure of the system it aims to produce. PASSI2 has been designed keeping in mind the possibility of designing systems with the following peculiarities: (i) highly distributed, (ii) subject to a (relatively) low rate of requirements changes, (iii) openness (external systems and agents that are unknown at design time will interact with the system to be built at runtime). Robotics, workflow management, and information systems are the specific application areas where it has been applied. As regards the implementation architecture, since we consider remarkably important the adoption (and enhancement) of standards for the diffusion of the agent-base software engineering, we decided to use the FIPA architecture although; this however, does not mean that PASSI cannot be largely applied for the design of non FIPA agents (like BDI ones). Actors involved in the design process are supposed to be designers with: • some experience of object-oriented design (using processes like the Unified Process [RUP,UP]). Starting from this requisite we propose a process that relies on common concepts like a functionality-oriented requirement analysis (differently from methodologies like Tropos [26] that is goal-based). This allows a smooth change towards AO approaches for a great number of already skilled designers that could profitably reuse their past experience without the significant slowdown induced by a remarkable change in their mental attitudes. • a good knowledge of UML and the use of related CASE tools. All the diagrams used in PASSI2 are based on the Unified Modeling Language and their syntax has been modified only to satisfy the needs of agents representation in a few limited cases. Sometimes the significance of their elements is mapped to agent-related concepts using stereotypes. • some kind of confidence with agent-oriented solutions. PASSI2 supports different levels of details and therefore it is recommended that the designer has some …