ADELFE

Atelier de Développement de Logiciels à Fonctionnalité Emergente


Toolkit to develop software with emergent functionality

 

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.

ADELFE is a RNTL-funded national project (RNTL stands for "Réseau National des Technologies Logicielles", http://www.telecom.gouv.fr/rntl/) which has been under study from December 2000 to August 2003.

Partners on this project are:

The aim of the ADELFE toolkit is to guide you during the development of adaptive multi-agent systems (AMAS, See http://www.irit.fr/SMAC/AmasTheory.html).

To do that, ADELFE software (which is downloadable at the URL: http://www.irit.fr/ADELFE), will provide you:

The ADELFE methodology is based on some well-known tools and notations coming from the object-oriented software engineering. These standards are UML (Unified Modelling Language) and the RUP (Rational Unified Process).

Another notation, AUML (Agent-UML, http://www.auml.org/), is used to express interaction protocols between agents.

ADELFE follows the RUP (interpreted by the Neptune project, http://neptune.irit.fr) and the "classical" workflows: Requirements (preliminary and finals), Analysis and Design must be studied to design a system. Complementary workflows such as Implantation and Deployment will be studied in a further version of ADELFE to allow you to study the whole software life-cycle process.

The ADELFE process has been expressed using OMG's SPEM (Software Process Engineering Metamodel, http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/spem.htm) and we reused the vocabulary (see the internal report available at http://www.irit.fr/ADELFE). We will speak of:

Because is ADELFE is devoted to the design of AMAS, some specific activities have been added to the RUP such as: