Name:ASG
Description:Agents and web services for grid computing
Abstract:Creating and using a design methodology for specific
application contexts is a great challenge today. Till now each
design methodology has been created for solving specific
problems in well defined context and it does not exist a
standard, general enough, methodology fitting all possible
situations thus requiring (by organizations) great efforts in
time and cost for creating, learning and /or using a specific
design methodology.<br>
A solution to that can be given by the method engineering and
multi agent system paradigm [2][3].<br>
Method engineering provides methods and techniques for
constructing ad-hoc design methodology ; in the proposed
work it is used as a base for tuning techniques for creating
multi agent system design methodologies (see Figure 1).
<br>In short some of the main elements are: the method fragment
(the portion of existing methodologies to be reused), the
method base (the repository where fragments are stored) and
the MAS Metamodel (the Multi Agent System Metamodel
that structures the system to be).
<br>The process to be followed is very huge and two tools have
been created in order to support it; the first is a CAPE
(Computer Aided Process Engineering) tool for aiding in the
management of the new methodology creation and the second
is a CAME (Computer Aided Method Engineering) for
assisting the method designer in querying and interfacing the
fragments repository.
<br>This CAPE tool was endowed with an extremely important
capability: auto-instantiating in the right CASE tool for
supporting each new created methodology.
<br>The CAPE tool was conceived as a multi-agent system
(Figure 2) where each agent of the society has specific
capability, specific goals and offers different services in order
to support the designer during his work; for instance there are
agents devoted to communicate with the users and to suggest
them the right (or the most useful) choice through the
collaboration with an expert system, some others are
responsible of assisting the whole

Created:2010-05-01
Last updated:2010-05-01