Integration of Aspects with i* Models

The i* framework has been widely adopted for agent-oriented modeling, as it offers a notation that provides a description in terms of dependency relationships among agents. However, the resulting models may be large and complex, with scattered concerns within the same, or among several models. These crosscutting concerns are not handled explicitly in i* models, affecting several other elements in the same model. In this paper we investigate if the Early Aspects, as promoted by the Aspect-Oriented Software Development community, can help to deal with the complexity which may arise when i* is used to develop large multi-agent systems. To achieve this we identify crosscutting concerns, keeping them in separate models. The consequence is a reduction in complexity and size of the original model. Composition rules are defined simultaneously, to keep a record of these modularized crosscutting elements. Thus, these rules work as transformations in model-driven engineering allowing us to recover the original, more refined model.