Towards Filling the Gap Between AOSE Methodologies and Infrastructure: Requirements and Meta-Model

Abstract

Many different methodologies have been proposed in Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) literature, and the concepts they rely on are different from those adopted when implementing the system. This conceptual gap often creates inconsistencies between specifications and implementation. We propose a metamodel-based approach that aims to bridge this gap, resulting in an integrated meta-model that merges the best aspects of four relevant AOSE methodologies (GAIA, Tropos, SODA and PASSI). The meta-model assembly followed a welldefined process: for each methodology to be integrated in the meta-model, we elicited the requirements, identified a set of process fragments, thoroughly compared the concepts belonging to the various fragments, and finally composed the meta-model.