Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology

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.

Authors

• Paolo Bresciani
• Anna Perini
• John Mylopoulos

Keywords

• agent-oriented software engineering
• multi-agent systems
• agent-oriented methodologies