Agent Oriented Software Engineering

A system that conforms to FIPA specifications (standards) is a FIPAcompliant system, and can interoperate with any other heterogeneous systems which are FIPA-compliant also. The conversion of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) into a FIPA-compliant system (i.e. one that adheres to FIPA standards), is important to support interoperability across different MAS. A different approach to conforming a MAS to a FIPA-compliant one, other that the common one of converting the whole system to adhere to FIPA specifications, is the use of the FIPA-compliant gateways . In this paper we extent our work on the FIPA-compliant gateways and we demonstrate the successful interoperability of the gateways based on a MAS utilising an active digital library composed of multi-spectral images of the Earth, as part of the Synthetic Aperture Radar Atlas (SARA).

Modern decision support systems (DSS) not only store large amounts of decision-relevant data, but also aim at assisting decision-makers to explore the meaning of that data, and to take decisions based on understanding. In transportation domains, a multiagent approach to the construction of DSS is becoming increasingly popular, because it does not only reduce design complexity, but it also adequately supports a dialogue-based stance on decision support interactions. However, despite recent advances in the field of agent-oriented software engineering, a principled approach to the design of multiagent systems for decision support is still to come. In this paper, we outline a design method for the construction of agent-based DSS. Setting out from an organisational and communicative model of decision support environments, we present an abstract

From a software engineering perspective, agent systems are a specialization of object-oriented (OO) systems, in which individual objects have their own threads of control and their own goals or sense of purpose. Engineering such systems is most naturally approached as an extension of object-oriented systems engineering. In particular, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be naturally extended to support the distinctive requirements of multi-agent systems. One such requirement results from the increasing emphasis on the correspondence between multi-agent systems and social systems. Sociological analogies are proving fruitful models for agent-oriented constructions, while sociologists increasingly use agents as a modeling tool for studying social systems. We combine several existing organizational models for agents, including AALAADIN, dependency theory, interaction protocols, and holonics, in a general theoretical framework, and show how UML can be applied and extended to capture constructions in that framework.

The initial step of any software engineering methodology is to form requirements. Recently, a goal-oriented approach to requirements has been proposed and argued to be beneficial. Goals also play a key role in the implementation of proactive software agents. However, although some agent-oriented software engineering methodologies have incorporated (aspects of) goal-oriented requirements engineering, and although they target agent platforms that provide goals as an implementation construct, none of the methodologies provide a goal-oriented design process. We present three modifications to the Prometheus methodology which aim to make it more goal-oriented in its design phases: we introduce a goal coupling diagram, as an adjunct to the existing data coupling diagram; we modify the temporal design artefacts to include goals; and we introduce a number of goal-related consistency checks. Finally, we report on an experimental evaluation comparing the effectiveness of the original and refined methodologies.

Prometheus is a well-established and widely used methodology. In this chapter, we briefly review the methodology and then discuss a number of active research directions. The key research directions that we discuss are: automated testing of agent systems, including test coverage; development of agent systems that are structured as teams, and of open agent systems that operate within Electronic Institutions; and the design and representation of agent interaction. We also briefly present the Prometheus Design Tool (PDT) and conclude with a brief look at other areas for future work.

Holonic multiagent systems offers a promising software engineering approach for developping applications in complex domains. However the process of building MASs and HMASs is radically different from the process of building more traditional software systems and so introduces new design and development issues. Against this background, this paper introduces organization-oriented abstractions for agent-oriented software engineering. We propose a complete organizational meta-model as the basis of a future complete methodological process from requirements to code. Besides to deal with this last aspect, we introduce our platform, called Janus, that was specifically designed to implement and deploy holonic multi-agent systems.

In this paper, we present a complete view of an agentoriented software engineering methodology called ASEM E (for AgentSystemsEngineeringM Ethodology). Several parts of the methodology concerning different aspects of the whole development process have been already published in the past in several papers. However, our goal in this paper is to provide a global view on the methodology by providing information about the agent (and multi-agent systems) development process along with recent works concerning the tools that we have developed in order to facilitate the use of ASEM E by agent systems developers. We also provide some information on the different practical applications that we have developed by using ASEM E and which prove that ASEM E is very well suited for an easy development or real world applications.

This article presents Gaia: a methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. The Gaia methodology is both general, in that it is applicable to a wide range of multi-agent systems, and comprehensive, in that it deals with both the macro-level (societal) and the micro-level (agent) aspects of systems. Gaia is founded on the view of a multi-agent system as a computational organisation consisting of various interacting roles. We illustrate Gaia through a case study (an agent-based business process management system).

Scope & Topics The International journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a BiMonthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas. Authors are solicited to contribute to the journal by submitting articles that illustrate research results, projects, surveying works and industrial experiences that describe significant advances in the areas of software engineering & applications.

The International journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a Bi-Monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Authors are solicited to contribute to the journal by submitting articles that illustrate research results, projects, surveying works and industrial experiences that describe significant advances in the areas of software engineering & applications.

El paradigma de Agentes de Software se ha convertido en un elemento de utilidad en el análisis
y diseño de nuevas aplicaciones sobre todo en el contexto Web y en Inteligencia Artificial
Distribuida (DAI). Su ventaja principal es poder abstraer del dominio de la aplicación aquellos
objetos que deben exhibir una conducta autónoma, colaborativa, comunicativa, adaptable y
algunas veces inteligente y poder modelarlos con esas características. Esta ventaja marca un
avance significativo en cuanto a la forma como el diseñador de software representa una
solución. Sin embargo, por poseer características que lo diferencian de los sistemas
tradicionales orientado a objetos, el paradigma orientado a agentes de software requiere un
enfoque distinto de desarrollo. Es por lo que es necesario definir metodologías de desarrollo de
sistemas con agentes adaptadas a las características de ese paradigma, herramientas para el
modelado de agentes, extensión de lenguajes de modelado como UML para adaptarlo al diseño
con agentes, diseño de nuevos Frameworks y su aplicación en dominios específicos, lenguajes
de programación orientado a agentes, entre otros. El objetivo de este trabajo es identificar
requerimientos para el desarrollo de aplicaciones con agentes de software, presentar aspectos
metodológicos y de diseño que diferencien el paradigma de agentes del paradigma de objetos, y
desarrollar Web Agent Framework (WAF). WAF es un framework para el desarrollo de
componentes de software con agentes que facilitará la aplicación del paradigma de agentes en
el desarrollo de aplicaciones Web. En este trabajo, WAF será utilizado para desarrollar iWAgent:
un componente de software con agentes que será integrado a la aplicación Portafolio PLUS.
Portafolio PLUS es una herramienta para control de portafolios de inversión diseñada para
funcionar en ambientes Web que le permite a los inversores y corredores bursátiles controlar
sus operaciones de forma automatizada, delegando las actividades de control de portafolios y
compra y venta de acciones a iWAgent. iWAgent realizará actividades de forma autónoma,
controlando el factor Riesgo/Rendimiento de cada uno de los portafolios asociados a Portafolio
PLUS. Portafolio PLUS realizará las funciones de sitio Web, donde se ofrecen las
funcionalidades necesarias para que tanto los inversores como los corredores puedan obtener
información de sus portafolios, las acciones disponibles para comprar, opciones para vender
acciones, estadísticas de movimientos, entre otras. Portafolio PLUS se desarrolló utilizando
INSITE una metodología para aplicaciones Web que contempla el uso de componentes de
software en la aplicación.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a Bi-Monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Advancements on microelectromechanical systems, embedded technologies, and wireless communications have recently enabled the evolution of conventional everyday things in enhanced entities, commonly defined Smart Objects (SOs). Their continuous and widespread diffusion, along with an increasing and pervasive connectivity, is enabling unforeseen interactions with conventional computing systems, places, animals and humans, thus fading the boundary between physical and digital worlds. The Internet of Things (IoT) term just refers to such futuristic scenario, namely a loosely coupled, decentralized and dynamic ecosystem in which billions (even trillions) of self-steering SOs are globally interconnected becoming active participants in business, logistics, information and social processes. Indeed, SOs are able to provide highly pervasive cyberphysical services to both humans and machines thanks to their communication, sensing, actuation, and embedded processing capabilities. Nowadays, the systemic revolution that can be led through the complete realization of the IoT vision is just at its dawn. As matter of facts, whereas new IoT devices and systems have been already developed, they often result in poorly interoperating "Intra-nets of things", mainly due to the heterogeneity featuring IoT building blocks and the lack of standards. Thus, the development of massive scaled (the total number of "things" is forecasted to reach 20.4 billion in 2020) and actually interoperable IoT systems is a challenging task, featured by several requirements and novel, even unsurveyed, issues.
In this context, a multidisciplinary and systematic development approach is necessary, so to involve different fields of expertise for coping with the cyberphysical nature of IoT ecosystem. Henceforth, full-fledged IoT methodologies are gaining traction, aiming at systematically supporting all development phases, addressing mentioned issues, and reducing time-to-market, efforts and probability of failure. In such a scenario, this Thesis proposes an application domain-neutral, full-fledged agent-based development methodology able to support the main engineering phases of IoT ecosystems. The definition of such systematic approach resulted in ACOSO-Meth (Agent-based COoperating Smart Objects Methodology), which is the major contribution of this thesis along with other interesting research efforts supporting (i.e., a multi-technology and multiprotocol smartphone-based IoT gateway) and extending (i.e., a full-fledged approach to the IoT services modeling according to their opportunistic properties) the main proposal. Finally, to provide validation and performance evaluation of the proposed ACOSO-Meth approach, four use cases (related to different application contexts such as a smart university campus, a smart digital library, a smart city and a smart workshop) have been developed. These research prototypes showed the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach and improved their respective state-of-the-art.

These are the proceedings of the International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS 2008), the sixth of a series of workshops that is aimed at discussing and providing an overview of current state-of-the-art technology for programming multi-agent systems.

Organization-based Multiagent Systems are a promising way to develop complex multiagent systems. However, it is still difficult to create large multiagent organizations from scratch. Multiagent organizations created using current AOSE methodologies tend to produce ad-hoc designs that work well for small applications but are not easily reused. In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for designing reusable multiagent organizations. It allows us to simplify multiagent organization designs and facilitate their reuse. We formalize the concepts required to design reusable organization-based multiagent services and show how we can compose those services to create larger, more complex multiagent systems. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by designing an application from the cooperative robotics field.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Organization-based Multiagent Systems are a promising way to develop complex multiagent systems. However, it is still difficult to create large multiagent organizations from scratch. Multiagent organizations created using current AOSE methodologies tend to produce ad-hoc designs that work well for small applications but are not easily reused. In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for designing reusable multiagent organizations. It allows us to simplify multiagent organization designs and facilitate their reuse. We formalize the concepts required to design reusable organization-based multiagent services and show how we can compose those services to create larger, more complex multiagent systems. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by designing an application from the cooperative robotics field.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Authors are solicited to contribute to the journal by submitting articles that illustrate research results, projects, surveying works and industrial experiences that describe significant advances in the areas of software engineering & applications.

An airline schedule seldom operates as planned. Problems related with aircrafts, crew members and passengers are common and the actions towards the solution of these problems are usually known as operations recovery or disruption management. The Airline Operations Control Center (AOCC) tries to solve these problems with the minimum impact in the airline schedule, with the minimum cost and, at the same time, satisfying all the required safety rules. Usually, each problem is treated separately and some tools have been proposed to help in the decision making process of the airline coordinators. We have observed the AOCC of TAP Portugal, the major Portuguese airline, and, from those observations, several hypotheses have been identified and some of them experimented. We believe, and that is one of our main hypothesis, that the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm is more adequate to represent the multi-level hierarchy organization and the several roles that are played in an AOCC. In this thesis we propose the design and partial implementation of a Distributed MAS representing the existing roles in an AOCC. We hypothesize that if we take advantage of the fact that each operational base has specific resources (both crew and aircrafts) and that if we include information regarding costs involved (for example, crew payroll information and hotels costs, among others), the solutions to the detected problems will be faster to find and less expensive. We also hypothesize that if we use specialized software agents that implement different solutions (heuristic and other solutions based in operations research models and artificial intelligence algorithms), to the same problem, the robustness of the system will increase. Finally, we believe that the inclusion of some kind of learning mechanism that learns from previous utilization of crew members will improve the solutions quality. Extending that learning mechanism to learn each crew member profile, and applying that knowledge for generating future schedules, the management of that expensive resource will be much more efficient and the level of satisfaction of each crew member will increase. We also present a real case study taken from TAP Portugal AOCC, where a crew recovery problem is solved using the MAS. Computational results using a real airline schedule are presented, including a comparison with a solution for the same problem found by the human operators in the Airline Operations Control Center. We show that, even for simple problems, and when comparing with solutions found by human operators in the case of this airline company, it is possible to find valid solutions, in less time and with a smaller cost. In this thesis we also show how we complement the GAIA methodology in order to better analyze and design the proposed MAS for the AOCC. Besides showing the rationale behind the analysis, design and implementation of our system, we also present how we mapped the abstractions used in agent-oriented design to specific constructs in JADE. The advantages of using a goal-oriented early requirements analysis and its influence on subsequent phases of analysis and design are also presented. Finally, we also propose UML 2.0 diagrams at several different levels for representation of GAIA deliverables, like organizational structure, role and interaction model, agent and service model.

6th International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (SOFEA 2020) is a forum for presenting new advances and research results in the fields of Software Engineering and Applications. The conference will bring together leading researchers, engineers and scientists in the domain of interest from around the world in these areas.

Intelligent agents is a powerful Artificial Intelligence technology which shows considerable promise as a new paradigm for mainstream software development. However, despite their promise, intelligent agents are still scarce in the market place. A key reason for this is that developing intelligent agent software requires significant training and skill: a typical developer or undergraduate struggles to develop good agent systems using the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) model (or similar models). This paper identifies the concept set which we have found to be important in developing intelligent agent systems and the relationships between these concepts. This concept set was developed with the intention of being clearer, simpler, and easier to use than current approaches. We also describe briefly a (very simplified) example from one of the projects we have worked on (RoboRescue), illustrating the way in which these concepts are important in designing and developing intelligent software agents.

In recent years, the increasing concerns around the centralized cloud web services (e.g. privacy, governance, surveillance, security) have triggered the emergence of new distributed technologies, such as IPFS or the Blockchain. These innovations have tackled technical challenges that were unresolved until their appearance. Existing models of peer-to-peer systems need a revision to cover the spectrum of potential systems that can be now implemented as peer-to-peer systems. This work presents a framework to build these systems. It uses an agent-oriented approach in an open environment where agents have only partial information of the system data. The proposal covers data access, data discovery and data trust in peer-to-peer systems where different actors may interact. Moreover , the framework proposes a distributed architecture for these open systems, and provides guidelines to decide in which cases Blockchain technology may be required, or when other technologies may be sufficient.

In order to investigate the economic performance of business processes, simulations are performed. These simulations determine values of key performance indicators (KPIs). We sought a valid solution to integrate KPIs in our Process Analysis Studio (PAS). Our investigation aims for a concept which describes a valid approach to deal with KPIs in multiple business process models. In this paper, we present a valid concept of a KPI calculation model. We describe which types of KPIs are needed in order to give users a huge amount of freedom to investigate different aspects of the process performance. Using scenarios could empower comprehensive investigations of different interrelated aspects of the process. From the presented concept of scenarios special requirements are derived which have to be considered in a concept of a KPI calculation model. The concept contributes to the discussion about the right design of a KPI calculation model. The presented approach could also be used in other process analysis solutions, in order to allow individual performance investigations.

Organization-based Multiagent Systems are a promising way to develop complex multiagent systems. However, it is still difficult to create large multiagent organizations from scratch. Multiagent organizations created using current AOSE methodologies tend to produce ad-hoc designs that work well for small applications but are not easily reused. In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for designing reusable multiagent organizations. It allows us to simplify multiagent organization designs and facilitate their reuse. We formalize the concepts required to design reusable organization-based multiagent services and show how we can compose those services to create larger, more complex multiagent systems. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by designing an application from the cooperative robotics field.

The goal of this paper is to provide some arguments in favor of the use of agent technology in real word applications. It does so through the, as much as possible, detailed description of a multi-agent system in the context of a real world application in the domain of ambient assisted living. It discusses development issues involving the use of the platform JADE and integrating computational argumentation and web services. It also gives some feedback concerning the experience of engineering such systems, especially when integrated in a more complex system with other components, but also concerning the perception of real users when using the system in an everyday life context.

ASEME is an emerging Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodology. The Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm encourages software modelers to automate the transition of one type of software model to another and eventually the code generation process. This paper builds on previous work that describes the model-driven development of agent systems using ASEME and creating a Platform Independent Model (PIM) that adheres to the language of statecharts, the Intra-Agent Control Model. In this contribution we use the generated statecharts and show how to automatically transform them to Java programs using the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE). All agent and behaviour classes are automatically generated including the agent interaction protocols.

Context: Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) represents the state-of-the-art technology that unifies mobile computing and cloud computing to develop systems that are portable yet resource sufficient. Mobile computing allows portable communication and context-aware computation, however, due to the energy and resource constraints mobile computing lacks performance for computationally intensive tasks. Cloud computing model uses the 'as a service' model-providing hardware and software services-to offer virtually unlimited storage and processing resources. The integration of mobile and cloud computing has given rise to the MCC systems that are portable, context-aware and resource sufficient. Challenges and Solution: To develop the MCC systems, some recurring challenges such as connectivity, context-awareness, portability and security must be addressed during the system design and architecting process. One way to address these challenges is to use the best practices and repeatable soluti...

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.

The dynamic nature of cooperative agent environment makes considerably more difficult the task of modeling permanent interactions among agents. This problem becomes rather hard if more than two agents are involved. So far, traditional approaches deal with the problem of modeling interactions in static conditions and commonly with only two agents participating concurrently in cooperative tasks. The complex nature of

In the AOSE (Agent-Oriented Software Engineering) area, several research efforts are underway to develop appropriate meta-models for agent-oriented methodologies. Meta-models are meant to check and verify the completeness and expressiveness of methodologies. In this paper, we put to test the well-established standard Unified Modelling Language (UML), and the emergent Object Process Methodology (OPM), and compare their meta-modelling power. Both UML and OPM are used to express the meta-model of SOFA, an agent-oriented methodology which stresses interaction and social aspects of MASs (multi-agent systems). Meta-modelling SOFA allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of the two approaches over both the structural and dynamics parts. Furthermore, this allow us to find out some desirable features that any effective approach to meta-modelling MAS methodologies should exhibit.

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies are proposed to develop complex distributed systems based upon the agent paradigm. The natural implementation for such systems has usually the form of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). As these systems are increasingly applied in mission-critical services, assurances need to be given to their owners and users that they operate properly. Although the relevance of the link between requirements engineering and testing has long been recognized, current Agent-Oriented Software Engineering methodologies partially address it. Some of them offer specification-based formal verification, allowing software developers to correct errors at the beginning of the development process, others exploits Object-Oriented (OO) testing techniques, upon a mapping of agent-oriented abstractions into OO constructs. However, a structured testing process for AOSE methodologies that complements formal verification is still missing. In this paper we introduce a testing framework for the AOSE methodology Tropos. It specifies a testing process model that complements the agent-oriented requirements and design models and strengthens the mutual relationship between goal analysis and testing. Furthermore, it provides a systematic way of deriving test cases from goal analysis. We call this approach goal-oriented testing.

Context: Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) represents the state-of-the-art technology that unifies mobile computing and cloud computing to develop systems that are portable yet resource sufficient. Mobile computing allows portable communication and context-aware computation, however, due to the energy and resource constraints mobile computing lacks performance for computationally intensive tasks. Cloud computing model uses the 'as a service' model-providing hardware and software services-to offer virtually unlimited storage and processing resources. The integration of mobile and cloud computing has given rise to the MCC systems that are portable, context-aware and resource sufficient. Challenges and Solution: To develop the MCC systems, some recurring challenges such as connectivity, context-awareness, portability and security must be addressed during the system design and architecting process. One way to address these challenges is to use the best practices and repeatable solutions to design and architect the MCC systems. In this research, we aim to utilise the empirically discovered patterns that support reusable design knowledge for architecture-driven development of the MCC systems. We follow a three-step process to empirically discover, document and apply patterns for architecting mobile cloud systems. Specifically, we have discovered three patterns as generic and reusable solutions for MCC systems. We demonstrate the applicability of the patterns based on a case study for architecture-centric development of the MCC patterns. The propose research aims to advance the state-of-the-art on reusable and knowledge-driven architecting of the MCC systems.

Several agent-oriented software engineering methodologies address the emerging challenges posed by the increasing need of adaptive software. A common denominator of such methodologies is the paramount importance of the concept of goal model in order to understand the requirements of a software system. Goal models consist of goal graphs representing AND/OR-decomposition of abstract goals down to operationalisable leaf-level goals. Goal models are used primarily in the earlier phases of software engineering, for social modelling, requirements elicitation and analysis, to concretise abstract objectives, to detail them and to capture alternatives for their satisfaction. Although various agent programming languages incorporate the notion of (leaf-level) goal as a language construct, none of them natively support the definition of goal models. However, the semantic gap between goal models used at design-time and the concept of goal used at implementation and execution time represent a limitation especially in the development of self-adaptive and fault-tolerant systems. In such systems, design-time knowledge on goals and variability becomes relevant at run-time, to take autonomous decisions for achieving high level objectives correctly. Recently, unifying operational semantics for (leaf) goals have been proposed [15]. We extend this work to define an operational semantics for the behaviour of goals in goal models, maintaining the flexibility of using different goal types and conditions. We use a simple example to illustrate how the proposed approach effectively deals with the semantic gap between design-time goal models and run-time agent implementations.

The International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications (IJSEA) is a bi-monthly open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Software Engineering & Applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software engineering concepts & establishing new collaborations in these areas.