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ADELFE Project

Atelier pour le DEveloppement de Logiciels à Fonctionnalité Emergente

ADELFE is the French acronym for "toolkit to develop software with emergent functionality" (Atelier pour le DEveloppement de Logiciels à Fonctionnalité Emergente)

Project «labeled» by the National Research and Innovation Network for Software Technologies (RNTL)

Dates: 01/12/2000 - 01/09/2003

Funding: French Ministry of Economy of Finances and Industry

Parterns:

ARTAL Technologies
IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse)
L3I (Laboratoire d'Informatique et d'Imagerie Industrielle)
TNI (Techniques Nouvelles d'Informatique)

Contact: Marie-Pierre Gleizes

Web site: http://www.irit.fr/ADELFE

On-line description and downloading: Release 1.2 available, see the ADELFE web site

Objectives of the Research Project

The main aim is to realise tools to guide software designers not specialised in software development with emerging functionalities. For facilitating the engineering process of such a system, a methodology is provided and it can be applied during the whole life cycle of software development.

This project is also developed to study the impact of adaptive systems design on the problematic of application configuration using components.

Designing software which is able to adapt itself to a highly dynamic environment implies a rigorous design methodology which must be different from the usual top-down approach. The aim of ADELFE is to guide designers during the development of adaptive self-organiser multi-agent systems. At the present time, neither such a methodology exist nor some design aid to develop such adaptive software. This project will allow to exploit an innovative know-how to implement software which can't be designed with classical approaches today.

The AMAS Technology

Software with emergent functionalities is based on adaptive and self-organiser multi-agent systems engineering (Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems : AMAS) developed within our team and ARTAL Technologies firm.

Thanks to their self-organisation and adaptation abilities, this software can operate in a very dynamical environment and can cope with unexpected events. It is fit to solve distributed complex problems for which it is impossible to implement a global control. With the advent of new technologies such as the Internet, with the evolution of machine networks, those multi-agent systems represent an answer to highly complex and distributed applications. After having defined the system components (i.e. the agents), we must give them capabilities to decide of their interactions. In this way, the application designer implements the agents and then the system in progress automatically configurates itself thanks to self-organisation without any designer's intervention.

Scientific Contribution of ADELFE

ADELFE wants to provide :

A notation (extension of "Unified Modelling Language") to support the methodology,
A methodology to extend the recommendations for analysis, design and development presented in the "Unified Software Development Process" guide. It allows the design of adaptive multi-agent systems for which there is no design methodology yet.

ADELFE is developed using the software package OpenTool © of the TNI firm. It will be then integrated in a specific version of OpenTool ©. The technical support for designing adaptive software includes :

a platform with a graphical modelling tool,
a library of components allowing simulations and fast prototyping,
a software components self-assembly technique where the components are the agents. This technique brings a new lighting on the configuration of based components applications.

: Functions of ADELFE

For ADELFE, working on the methodology consists in extending the recommendations for the analysis, the design and the development of the RUP presented in the "Unified Software Development Process" guide to cope with the modelling and achievement of adaptive multi-agents systems. This process allows to take into account all the activities of the software life cycle (collecting the requirements, analysis, design, implementation and tests) via UML models. Its approach, based on a system decomposition into interface interconnected components fits well to a transition into multi-agent systems. The methodology will be then associated with a library of components used in the development life cycle. The identification, structuring into classes and components phases may be adapted to a decomposition into self-organiser agents. The proposed methodology must allow non specialist designer to certify that his software is an adaptive multi-agent system actually.

Software Lifecycle

Analysis Phase

In a first step, an interactive tool allows the designer to know if an adaptive multi-agent system is useful for the proposed application. This tool verifies if the AMAS technology can be applied using some criteria:

great complexity, no other method available,
not well define frontiers,
physical or functional distribution,
evolutionary environment,
cooperating or interacting entities.

Afterwards, the analysis phase has the same goals that the one in the object oriented approach, some help is brought to the designer to let him identify the adaptive agents. The relevance of AMAS for the given problem is established and validated by a prototype implementation.

Design Phase

This phase consists in giving a behaviour to the agents and to the multi-agent system environment. To do this, we must focus on the exhaustive description of the environment i.e. what it can do, regarding its interactions with the different agents or the system as a whole and what are its own behaviours. For an agent design, ADELFE proposes a generic agent description with seven modules : communication with other agents, communication with the environment, beliefs about itself, beliefs about other agents, beliefs about its environment, skills and cooperative social attitude.

The behaviour results from the informations contained in these seven modules. The decision on the agent behaviour depends on the description of the uncooperative situations that an agent can locally detect at a given time. For each agent, we must exhaustively explicit, considering the information perceived from the environment, the cases in which the agent knows that it is performing a bad function or that it can correct the erroneous action. Once those situations described, the designer can notice the actions the agent must perform to correct the system behaviour and optimize it.

The beliefs or the skills of an agent can be implemented by an adaptive multi-agent system. The designer must then apply the first step to know how to design it.

References about the Project

Conference Papers

Dissemination

GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, MILLAN Thierry, PICARD Gauthier - ADELFE: Using SPEM Notation to Unify Agent Engineering Processes and Methodology - IRIT internal repor, IRIT/2003-10-R, June 2003 (pdf, 234 Kb)
PICARD Gauthier - ADELFE : Méthodologie de Développement de Logiciels à Fonctionnalité Emergente et Ingénierie des AMAS - EDIT'03 - PhD Symposium (Ecole Doctorale Informatique et Télécommunications, 14-15 April 2003.
GEORGÉ Jean-Pierre, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, GliZE Pierre - Participation à to the meeting of the ASA group of AFIA - October 2002, Lille.
Results of ETTO (Emergent Time-Table Organization), the application linked to ADELFE, was presented.
PICARD Gauthier - ADELFE - Poster presented during the RNTL Sessions, SITEF, Toulouse, October 23rd-24th 2002 (in french).

BERNON Carole, GliZE Pierre - Participation to the meeting of the ASA (Architecture de Systèmes d'Agents) group of AFIA - march 2002, Paris. We had proposed a specification for a planning problem (in french).
(See also the section about Documents for the associated slides)
BERNON Carole - ADELFE's First steps + Personal visions - SIG MSEAS - AgentLink II's meeting in Amsterdam, decembre 2001
(See also the section about Documents for the associated slides)
GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PICARD Gauthier - Participation to the meeting of the ASA (Architecture de Systèmes d'Agents) group of AFIA - October 2001.
GLEIZES Marie-Pierre - Some Methodology Basis for Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems Design Agentlink II General Meeting - Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems Methodologies - Prague, july 2001.
(See also the section about Documents for the associated slides)
GliZE Pierre - Présentation du projet ADELFE - Colloque du RNTL, 26 et 27 avril 2001, dans le cadre des Premières Rencontres des Sciences et Technologies de l'Information ASTI'2001 à Paris (Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie - Centre des Congrès La Villette).
The contents of this page is taken from the corresponding french brochure.