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Dealing with Complexity in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: The Importance of Interactions

  • Chapter
Conquering Complexity

Abstract

Agent Oriented Software Engineering was born with the promise of allowing more complex systems to be built than can be with traditional OO techniques. This promise is supported by mimicking human organizations and, thus, using “agents”, rather than Objects, as the main modelling artifact. Systems developed this way usually present features that make them complex; that is to say, their behavior cannot be fully predicted. However, such degrees of unpredictability may not be acceptable for some domain applications, e.g., real-time systems or critical business applications. If we analyze these kinds of system, we soon discover that their complexity is mainly derived as a result of the interactions between their constituent components. These interactions provoke chains of cause-effects that are hard to deal with from an engineering point of view, if we do not counter them with appropriate tools. In this chapter, we present the main principles for dealing with complexity, emphasizing how to use them when addressing complex systems. In addition, we show that to overcome complexity in these kinds of systems, it is essential to focus modelling on the main source of the problem: Interactions. Finally, to exemplify all of these principles, we address a typical complex system, an Ant Colony, showing how—by applying the principles and focusing on interactions—we can derive an engineering model that dissects the cause-effect chains to show how the individual behavior of each ant produces the overall complex behavior of the entire colony.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The StarLogo definition is available here: http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/samples/ants.htm.

  2. 2.

    The Santa Fe Institute’s webpage is here: http://www.santafe.edu/.

  3. 3.

    Notice that hereafter we call it Composition in order to differentiate it from the organization term in AOSE.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER) and the Spanish Government under the CICYT project SETI (TIN2009-07366), and by the Andalusian Government under the projects ISABEL (P07-TIC-2533 and TIC-5906) and THEOS (TIC-5906).

This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grant 03/CE2/I303_1 to Lero—the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (www.lero.ie)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Joaquin Peña & Antonio Ruiz-Cortés

  2. Intelligent Automation Inc., Rockville, USA

    Renato Levy

  3. Lero—the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Mike Hinchey

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  1. Joaquin Peña
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  2. Renato Levy
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  3. Mike Hinchey
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  4. Antonio Ruiz-Cortés
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Correspondence to Joaquin Peña .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lero, Irish Software Eng Research Ctr, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Mike Hinchey

  2. Lero, International Science Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Lorcan Coyle

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Peña, J., Levy, R., Hinchey, M., Ruiz-Cortés, A. (2012). Dealing with Complexity in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: The Importance of Interactions. In: Hinchey, M., Coyle, L. (eds) Conquering Complexity. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2297-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2297-5_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-2296-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-2297-5

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