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.