The Researches On Agent-Based Model Transformations

Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) takes agent as the basic concept and computing model to support the development of software systems. It is recognized as a novel software paradigm in the literature of software engineering, and recently gains more and more attentions in the academic and industry field. However, such technology has not widely used. Several problems about the reseaches and practice of AOSE should be addressed. (1) AOSE lacks of integration with successful mainstream technologies of software engineering. (2) AOSE lacks of effective CASE tools to improve the usability of the techniques and support the development of agent-based software systems. (3) The quality and efficiency of the agent-oriented software development should be enhanced. The tendency of AOSE researches is to integrate with mainstream software engineering technologies. Exploiting MDA ideas and techniques in AOSE is helpful to effectively improve the quality and efficiency of agent-based software development. Such goal is achieved by reusing the models and performing the model mapping and is important to make AOSE mature and practical.The thesis borrows the MDA approach into AOSE, investigates the agent-based model transformation techniques, and integrates the MDA with ODAM– an agent-oriented methodology. ODAM adopts organization metaphor and supports the model-driven development. It takes organization-based abstract models as PIMs and models established on specific platform as PSMs. The thesis views JADE and SADE as platforms that are dependent of specific implementation techniques, establishes the relationship between the source meta-model and target meta-model, presents a number of model transformation rules that support the transformation between PIM and PSM, PSM and source codes, and further designs the corresponding algorithm for the above transformation. A software tool called ODAMTransformer is also developed to support ODAM and the model transformation in an autonomic way. Lastly, a whole case is studied to demonstrate our approach and its effectiveness.