THE ADELFE METHODOLOGY Designing Adaptive Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents a method named ADELFE, which is led by the Rational Unified Process but is devoted to software engineering of adaptive multi-agent systems. ADELFE guarantees that the software is developed according to the AMAS theory. We focus this presentation on the four first core workflows of the RUP. Therefore, in the preliminary requirements an agreement on what the system has to do must be reached. During the final requirements phase, the environment of the studied system must be defined and characterized. Then, in the analysis phase, the engineer is guided to decide to use adaptive multi-agent technology and to identify the agents through the system and the environment models. Finally, the design workflow of ADELFE must provide the cooperative agent’s model and helps the developer to define the local agents’ behavior. We illustrate the methodology by applying it to a case study: a timetable design.