An architectural framework for describing BDI Multi-Agent Information systems

The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, enterprise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly changed our views on information systems engineering. Information systems must now be based on open architectures that continuously evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. These new requirements, in turn, call for new concepts and techniques for engineering and managing information systems. For these reasons - and more - Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are gaining popularity over traditional systems, including object-oriented ones. They do provide for an open, evolving architecture which can change at run-time to exploit the services of new agents, or replace under-performing ones. However, MAS architecture rapidly become complicated due to the ever-increasing complexity of these new business IT domains and their actors: as the expectations of users and business stakeholders change day after day, as the complexity of systems, information and communication technologies and organizations continually increases in today's dynamic environments, developers are expected to produce architectures that must handle more difficult and intricate requirements that were not taken into account ten years ago, making architectural design a central engineering issue in modern enterprise information system life-cycle. To cope with this complexity in architectural engineering, there have been, through the last decade, different proposals for providing a sound basis for describing formally system architecture and reasoning about it. In particular, a number of architecture description languages and well-established architectural styles have been proposed. An Architectural Description Language (ADL) provides a concrete syntax for specifying architectural abstractions in a descriptive notation. An architectural style specifies a set of architectural constraints defining a family of architectures that satisfy them. Unfortunately, despite this progress, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining architectural styles and description languages for MASs. This work proposes to study both issues as a natural extension of the current research on software architecture, with respect to the changing face of technology. To do this, we provides an architectural framework for promoting the use of MAS when developing information systems. This framework is composed of a catalogue of re-usable styles detailing how to exploit a specific architectural configuration and of an agent-oriented ADL. This ADL, called SkwyRL-ADL, aims at capturing a 'core' set of structural and behavioral concepts that are fundamental to describe BDI-MAS architectures. We apply the framework on two real-world applications: an e-commerce application supporting the transactions of products, services and payment across the Internet and an data integration system aimed at accessing data from several dynamic and heterogeneous information sources.Doctorat en sciences de gestion (IAG 3)--UCL, 200