Anna Perini

JAAMAS Journal 2026 Journal Article

Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology

• Paolo Bresciani
• Anna Perini
• John Mylopoulos

Abstract Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called Tropos, 1 for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all related mentalistic notions (for instance goals and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study. The Tropos language for conceptual modeling is formalized in a metamodel described with a set of UML class diagrams.

AAMAS Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Evolutionary Testing of Autonomous Software Agents

• Cu D. Nguyen
• Anna Perini
• Paolo Tonella
• Simon Miles
• Mark Harman
• Michael Luck

A system built in terms of autonomous agents may require even greater correctness assurance than one which is merely reacting to the immediate control of its users. Agents make substantial decisions for themselves, so thorough testing is an important consideration. However, autonomy also makes testing harder; by their nature, autonomous agents may react in different ways to the same inputs over time, because, for instance they have changeable goals and knowledge. For this reason, we argue that testing of autonomous agents requires a procedure that caters for a wide range of test case contexts, and that can search for the most demanding of these test cases, even when they are not apparent to the agents’ developers. In this paper, we address this problem, introducing and evaluating an approach to testing autonomous agents that uses evolutionary optimization to generate demanding test cases.

AAMAS Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Operational Semantics of Goal Models in Adaptive Agents

• Mirko Morandini
• Loris Penserini
• Anna Perini

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.

AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

eCAT: a Tool for Automating Test Cases Generation and Execution in Testing Multi-Agent Systems

• Cu Duy Nguyen
• Anna Perini
• Paolo Tonella

We introduce eCAT, a tool that supports deriving test cases semi-automatically from goal-based analysis diagrams, generates meaningful test inputs based on agent interaction ontology, and more importantly it can evolve and execute test cases automatically and continuously on a multi-agent system (MAS). Our experiments have shown that the proposed tool can exercise MAS more extensively and effectively than manual testing under the usual time constraints.

AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Ontology-based Test Generation for Multi Agent Systems

• Cu Nguyen
• Anna Perini
• Paolo Tonella

This paper investigates software agents testing, and in particular how to automate test generation. We propose a novel approach, which takes advantage of agent interaction ontologies that define content semantic of agent interactions to: (i) generate test inputs; (ii) guide the exploration of the input space during generation; and, (iii) verify messages exchanged among agents with respect to the defined interaction ontology. We integrated the proposed approach into a testing framework, called eCAT, which can generate and evolve test cases automatically, and run them continuously.

AAMAS Conference 2007 Conference Paper

A Design Framework for Generating BDI-Agents from Goal Models

• Loris Penserini
• Anna Perini
• Angelo Susi
• Mirko Morandini
• John Mylopoulos

We define a tool-supported design framework that allows to specify an agent goal model and to automatically generate fragments of a BDI agent from it. We devise the design process as a transformation process from platform-independent design models to platformspecific models and then to code. The design framework is demonstrated by referring to the Tropos methodology and to the JADE/Jadex platform. In this short paper, key steps in the process are illustrated through an example.

TAAS Journal 2007 Journal Article

High variability design for software agents

• Loris Penserini
• Anna Perini
• Angelo Susi
• John Mylopoulos

Many classes of distributed applications, including e-business, e-government, and ambient intelligence, consist of networking infrastructures, where the nodes (peers)—be they software components, human actors or organizational units—cooperate with each other to achieve shared goals. The multi-agent system metaphor fits very well such settings because it is founded on intentional and social concepts and mechanisms. Not surprisingly, many agent-oriented software development methods have been proposed, including GAIA, PASSI, and Tropos. This paper extends the Tropos methodology, enhancing its ability to support high variability design through the explicit modelling of alternatives, it adopts an extended notion of agent capability and proposes a refined Tropos design process. The paper also presents an implemented software development environment for Tropos, founded on the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) framework and standards. The extended Tropos development process is illustrated through a case study involving an e-commerce application.

EUMAS Conference 2006 Conference Paper

Agent Capability: Automating the Design to Code Process

• Loris Penserini
• Anna Perini
• Angelo Susi
• John Mylopoulos