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 is for Réseau National des Technologies) 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).

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

This Html and on-line version will help you to follow the process but will not provide you the complementary tools such as OpenTool (which is available on the TNI-Valiosys web site by ftp (section named "adelfe")) and the adequacy graphical tool (that you can download as a zipped jar file, here).

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), is used to express interaction protocols between agents.

ADELFE follows the RUP (modified by the Neptune project) 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) and we reused the vocabulary (see the internal report provided here in pdf). We will speak of:

Because is ADELFE is devoted to the design of AMAS, some specific activities have been added to the RUP (interpreted by the Neptune project) such as: