Kuldar Taveter

Agent-Oriented Enterprise Modeling Based on Business Rules

Business rules are statements that express (certain parts of) a business policy, defining business terms and defining or constraining the operations of an enterprise, in a declarative manner. Since these rules define and constrain the interaction among business agents in the course of business processes, they have to refer to the components of their mental state, such as the knowledge/information and the commitments of an organization. We propose an agent-oriented approach to business rules and show how to represent and visualize business rules and business processes in Agent-Object-Relationship modeling.

Handbook of Research on Emerging Rule-based Languages and Technologies: Open Solutions and Approaches

Selecting an appropriate rules-based engine requires balancing many different, and often, not well-understood properties such as business rules representation methods, rule history and life cycle management, and interoperability with external data sources. The Handbook of Research on Emerging Rule-Based Languages and Technologies: Open Solutions and Approaches provides a comprehensive collection of state-of-the-art advancements in rule languages, containing methodologies for building rule-based applications, rule interoperability and interchange, and rule-based applications. Developers of rule-based languages and technologies as well as users of these applications will find this Handbook of Research to be a significant resource within the field.

Towards radical agent-oriented software engineering processes based on AOR modeling

We propose an agent-oriented software engineering process, called RAP, which follows the rational unified process (RUP) in many ways, but is based on agent-object-relationship (AOR) modeling instead of object-oriented modeling. Two particular features of the proposed methodology are: it is supported by a foundational ontology, and it employs a certain form of agent-based discrete event simulation for achieving more agility in the development process.

eContractual choreography-language properties towards cross-organizational business collaboration

Meaningfully automating sociotechnical business collaboration promises efficiency-, effectiveness-, and quality increases for realizing next-generation decentralized autonomous organizations. For automating business-process aware cross-organizational operations, the development of existing choreography languages is technology driven and focuses less on sociotechnical suitability and expressiveness concepts and properties that recognize the interaction between people in organizations and technology in workplaces. This gap our suitability- and expressiveness exploration fills by means of a cross-organizational collaboration ontology that we map as a proof-of-concept evaluation to the eSourcing Markup Language (eSML). The latter we test in a feasibility case study to meaningfully support the automation of business collaboration. The developed eSourcing ontology and eSML is replicable for exploring strengths and weaknesses of other choreography languages.

Requirements Elicitation and Specification Using the Agent Paradigm: The Case Study of an Aircraft Turnaround Simulator

In this paper, we describe research results arising from a technology transfer exercise on agent-oriented requirements engineering with an industry partner. We introduce two improvements to the state-of-the-art in agent-oriented requirements engineering, designed to mitigate two problems experienced by ourselves and our industry partner: (1) the lack of systematic methods for agent-oriented requirements elicitation and modelling; and (2) the lack of prescribed deliverables in agent-oriented requirements engineering. We discuss the application of our new approach to an aircraft turnaround simulator built in conjunction with our industry partner, and show how agent-oriented models can be derived and used to construct a complete requirements package. We evaluate this by having three independent people design and implement prototypes of the aircraft turnaround simulator, and comparing the three prototypes. Our evaluation indicates that our approach is effective at delivering correct, complete, and consistent requirements that satisfy the stakeholders, and can be used in a repeatable manner to produce designs and implementations. We discuss lessons learnt from applying this approach.

Task knowledge patterns reuse in multi-agent systems development

Template-based knowledge models can be viewed as design patterns for specifying a task [12]. The models can serve as reusable artifacts during the development of a multi agent system using the MAS-CommonKADS methodology. However, based on our observation of existing patterns, we note limitations of reusing those patterns in agent development. This paper presents task knowledge patterns that are described through our improved agent oriented template structure. The improved template structure presented in this paper provides an alternative approach to defining task knowledge patterns by incorporating a two dimensional view of agent oriented models. The task knowledge patterns introduced in this paper describe task knowledge in an agent context, while explicitly providing a description designed to encourage use and reuse in agent oriented software development. A demonstration of the reuse of task knowledge patterns in agent oriented modelling is presented in this paper. Specifically we show how a particular task knowledge pattern, selection of relevant source materials, can be used to rapidly prototype an adviser finder multi-agent system.

A Multi-perspective Methodology for Modelling Inter-enterprise Business Processes

We propose an agent-oriented methodology for modelling business processes between enterprises that consists of the steps of analysis and design. The analysis starts by modelling intentional dependencies between the actors of the problem domain at hand, and continues by modelling intentional relationships that are internal to the actors, such as task decomposition links. In the design, intentional dependencies between the actors are transformed to commitment-based models of interactions between the agents. Models of tasks performed by the actors, obtained as a result of means-ends analysis, are transformed to activities and reaction rules, defining the behaviours of agents. The methodology is evaluated by using the case study of an electronic advertising process in newspapers.

Engineering societal information systems by agent-oriented modeling

This article is concerned with the engineering of societal information systems where technical components of a system - software agents - support the social network around which the system is centered. We propose agent-oriented modeling as a suitable software engineering approach for developing open and adaptive societal information systems. The article first outlines the steps of the software engineering process of agent-oriented modeling and shows how the resulting models can be mapped to the simulation environment. It then describes two case studies where agent-oriented modeling has successfully been applied. The first case study addresses the development of an agent-based decision-making system for helping customers in grocery shopping. The second case study treats the engineering of a societal information system for helping patients in finding healthcare providers. The simulation results from both case studies are presented and discussed. We conclude the article by comparing related work and drawing conclusions. This work was performed while the first author was a Fulbright Scholar with the University of South Carolina.

Reconciling ontological differences by assistant agents

In this paper, we propose an alternative solution for approaching the problem of semantic interoperability, based on recent projects to develop software agents and systems that attempt to reconcile ontological differences without explicit formal ontologies. An application capable of reconciling ontologies based on example data is first described. The results from one of the case studies where the proposed solution has been applied are reported. Finally, the design of an agent embedding the solution is sketched. The solution is aimed at the creation of assistant agents helping the users to cope with heterogeneity in both information sources and contexts of their usage.

Agent-oriented modelling for simulation of complex environments

This article addresses the application of agent-oriented modelling to composing scenarios for simulating problem domains consisting of heterogeneous entities that include humans, physical subsystems, and software components whose behaviours depend on the situation at hand. The article presents an overview of agent-oriented modelling and addresses the application of agent-oriented modelling and simulation for context-aware crisis management and military urban operations. We develop an approach for constructing vignettes of situation-aware behaviour to be further simulated by means of software agents and describe the creation of practical context-aware training scenarios. Finally, the article explores a platform currently in use for possible execution of agent-based simulations. Our approach is applicable in practice for testing typical behavioural vignettes in specific scenarios using the platform. Unique benefit of the proposed approach is its usability to observe how real subjects form their decisions to behave in certain situations.