From AOSE Methodologies to MAS Infrastructures: The SODA Case Study

Research on agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies and multi-agent system (MAS) infrastructures has developed in the last years along two opposite paths: while AOSE methodologies have essentially undergone a top-down evolution pushed by contributions from heterogeneous fields like human sciences, MAS infrastructures have mostly followed a bottom-up path growing from existing and widespread (typically object-oriented) technologies. This dichotomy has produced a conceptual gap between the proposed AOSE methodologies and the agent infrastructures actually available, as well as a technical gap in the MAS engineering practice, where methodologies are often built ad hoc out of MAS infrastructures, languages and tools. This paper proposes a new method for filling the gap between methodologies and infrastructures based on the definition and study of the metamodels of both AOSE methodologies and MAS infrastructures. By allowing structural representation of abstractions to be captured along with their mutual relations, meta-models make it possible to map design-time abstractions from AOSE methodologies upon run-time abstractions from MAS technologies, thus promoting a more coherent and effective practice in MAS engineering. In order to validate our method, we take an AOSE methodology, SODA, and show how it can be mapped upon three different MAS infrastructures using meta-models as mapping guidelines.