A Framework For BDI Agent-Based Software Engineering

Agent-based software engineering has been regarded as a new notion to build complex software systems. A seamless development, from modeling to implementation of agent-based software, is the new revolution in software engineering. However, there has not been a simple and efficient means to facilitate agent-based software development. In this paper, we propose an agent-based software development process based on the BeliefDesire-Intention (BDI) agent model as a new software development process. The Belief-DesireIntention (BDI) model has been used a fundamental ingredient to the new agent-based modeling method. In our agent system proposed here, each agent is made flesh by assigning its own belief, desire and intention. Here we have shown a seamless software development modeling technique consistently based on the BDI model. Even though there are many valuable arguments to define agents beside the BDI model, we currently adopt the BDI model to our agent modeling because we try to develop a simple and realistic agent-based modeling technique. We will extend this work to support other key concepts in agent computing. Here we propose a new approach comparing with our previous approach to support the BDI agent-based modeling techniques. The previous approach finds intention, desire and belief from two different kinds of use cases – external use cases and internal use cases – and supporting tools. The new approach finds in sequence desire, intention and belief by using not only different kinds of use cases, sequence diagram, activity diagrams, and dataflow diagrams. To prove the usability of our software development process, we also provide a case study of agent-based software development for the California Super Lotto System (CSLS) application. This paper also introduces 286 C.H. Jo, G. Chen and J. Choi SIU 2004 a brief structure of a CASE tool, which we have currently been developing to support the BDI agent-based software development process.