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

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

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.

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

See also SMAC's publications.

• BERNON Carole, CAMPS Valérie, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PICARD Gauthier - Engineering Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems: the ADELFE Methodology - In B. Henderson-Sellers and P. Giorgini (Eds.), Agent-Oriented Methodologies. Idea Group Pub, June 2005, pp.172-202.
• PICARD Gauthier, CAPERA Davy, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, GLIZE Pierre - A Sample Application of ADELFE Focusing on Analysis and Design - The Mechanical Synthesis Problem - Fifth International Workshop Engineering Societies in the Agents World (ESAW'04), Toulouse, France, October 20-22, 2004.
• BERNON Carole, COSSENTINO Massimo, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, TURCI Paola, ZAMBONELli Franco - A Study of some Multiagent Meta-Models - Fifth International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE-2004) at the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004), New York City, New York - July 19, 2004
• PICARD Gauthier, BERNON Carole, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre - Cooperative Agent Model within ADELFE Framework: An Application to a Timetabling Problem - Poster at the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004), New York City, New York - July 19, 2004
• CAPERA Davy, PICARD Gauthier, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre - Applying ADELFE Methodology to a Mechanism Design Problem - Poster at the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004), New York City, New York - July 19, 2004
• PICARD Gauthier and GLEIZES Marie-Pierre - The ADELFE Methodology - Designing Adaptive Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems (Chapter 8) - Pages 157-176, In F. Bergenti, M-P. Gleizes, and F. Zambonelli, editors, Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems. The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering handbook. Kluwer Publishing, 1-4020-8057-3, 2004.
• PICARD Gauthier - UML Stereotypes Definition and AUML Notations for ADELFE Methodology with OpenTool - First European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS’03), Oxford, UK, 2003
• GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PICARD Gauthier - Outils pour la réalisation de systèmes multi-agents adaptatifs dans le cadre de la méthode ADELFE Journées Francophones sur les Systèmes Multi-Agents, JFSMA'03, 27-29 novembre 2003, Hammamet, Tunisie.
• BERNON Carole, CAMPS Valérie, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PICARD Gauthier - ADELFE : Atelier de développement de logiciels à fonctionnalité émergente Démonstration lors des Journées Francophones sur les Systèmes Multi-Agents, JFSMA'03, 27-29 novembre 2003, Hammamet, Tunisie.
• BERNON Carole, CAMPS Valérie, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PICARD Gauthier - Designing Agents’ Behaviours within the Framework of ADELFE Methodology Fourth International Workshop "Engineering Societies in the Agents World" (ESAW-2003), 29-31 October, 2003, Imperial College London.
• BERNON Carole, CAMPS Valérie, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PICARD Gauthier - Tools for Self-Organizing Applications Engineering - The First International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organising Applications (ESOA'03) Melbourne, Australia, July 2003.
  In Engineering Self-Organising Systems, Nature-Inspired Approaches to Software Engineering, LNCS, LNAI n. 2977, G. Di Marzo Serugendo, A. Karageorgos,O.F. Rana, F. Zambonelli (Eds), Springer Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-540-21201-9.
• BERNON Carole, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PEYRUQUEOU Sylvain, PICARD Gauthier - ADELFE, a Methodology for Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems Engineering - Third International Workshop "Engineering Societies in the Agents World" (ESAW-2002), 16-17 September 2002, Madrid. Slides
• BERNON Carole, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, PICARD Gauthier, GLIZE Pierre - The Adelfe Methodology For an Intranet System Design - Fourth International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS-2002), 27-28 May 2002, Toronto (Ontario, Canada) at CAiSE'02 (Voir aussi le site de AOIS'02). Abstract
• BERNON Carole, CAMPS Valérie, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, GLIZE Pierre - La conception de systèmes multi-agents adaptatifs : contraintes et spécificités - Atelier de Méthodologie et Environnements pour les Systèmes Multi-Agents (SMA 2001), Plate-forme AFIA, Grenoble du 25 au 28 juin 2001, Z. Guessoum et M. Occello, coords.
• CASTERAN Jean-Christophe, GLEIZES Marie-Pierre, GLIZE Pierre - 8ièmes Journées Francophones Intelligence Artificielle Distribuée et Systèmes Multi-Agents - Editions Hermès, octobre 2000

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.