The MESSAGE Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design

Abstract

This chapter presents the MESSAGE agent-oriented software engineering methodology and illustrates it in an analysis and design case study. The methodology covers MAS analysis and design and is intended for use in mainstream software engineering departments. MESSAGE integrates into a coherent AOSE methodology basic agent-related concepts (such as organisation, role, goal, interaction, and task) that have so far been studied largely in isolation. The MESSAGE notation extends the UML with agent knowledge-level concepts and diagrams with notations for viewing them. The proposed diagrams extend UML class and activity diagrams. TheMESSAGE analysis and design process is based on the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The methodology distinguishes high-level from detailed design. An organisation-driven approach is presented for detailed design, where the global architecture of the MAS is derived from the structure and behaviour of the organisations that interact. Experimentation with the methodology shows that it supports the analysis and design of multi-agent systems that are flexible and adapt to specific kind of changes in a heterogeneous and dynamic environment.

Situated process engineering for integrating processes from methodologies to infrastructures

“…In order to test our approach, we also plan to make the same experiments with other methodologies, selected among Gaia [33], PASSI [4], Tropos [11], MESSAGE [8] or INGENIAS [28], and other infrastructures such as CArtAgO [29], TOTA [16], and RoleX [2].…”

Understanding Agent-Oriented Software Engineering methodologies

“…Table 1 corresponds to two of the earliest methodologies to be cited in the literature: GAIA (Zambonelli et al ., 2005) and MESSAGE (Garijo et al ., 2005). These pioneering works have had a remarkable influence in AOSE.…”

“…MESSAGE (Garijo et al ., 2005) is a methodology with a wider scope than GAIA. It was a pioneer work in providing a notation and vocabulary using meta-models in MAS, having only AALAADIN (Ferber & Gutknecht, 1998) as precedent.…”

Towards the Consolidation of a Diagramming Suite for Agent-Oriented Modelling Languages

“…In particular, our anticipation that the Architecture view should be independent of technology chosen for the solution, as described, for instance, in Giorgini et al [67], is not met (see further discussion in Section 5.2). In other methodologies, the different use of terms such as "model, " "diagram, " "view, " and "viewpoint" is often unclear (e.g., [20,29,31,39,49,90]). As another example, PASSI confounds work product terms with process terms by using model/diagram names to describe tasks.…”