Skip to main content

Evaluating an Agent-Oriented Approach for Change Propagation

  • Conference paper
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering IX (AOSE 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5386))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

A central problem in software maintenance is change propagation: given a set of primary changes that have been made to software, what additional secondary changes are needed? Although many approaches have been proposed, automated change propagation is still a significant technical challenge in software engineering. In this paper we report on an evaluation of an agent-based approach for change propagation that works by repairing violations of well-formedness consistency rules in a design model. The results have shown that given a reasonable amount of primary changes, the approach is able to assist the designer by recommending feasible secondary change options that match the designer’s intentions.

This work has been funded by the Australian Research Council under grant LP0453486, in collaboration with Agent Oriented Software. We would also like to thank Lin Padgham, Sebastian Sardina and other members of the RMIT Agent Group for discussion relating to this work.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Vliet, H.V.: Software engineering: principles and practice, 2nd edn. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chichester (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Rajlich, V.: A model for change propagation based on graph rewriting. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), pp. 84–91. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Arnold, R., Bohner, S.: Software Change Impact Analysis. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Briand, L.C., Labiche, Y., O’Sullivan, L., Sowka, M.M.: Automated impact analysis of UML models. Journal of Systems and Software 79(3), 339–352 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Egyed, A.: Fixing inconsistencies in UML models. In: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (May 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Nentwich, C., Emmerich, W., Finkelstein, A.: Consistency management with repair actions. In: ICSE 2003: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 455–464. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Object Management Group: Object Constraint Language (OCL) 2.0 Specification (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Object Management Group: Unified Modeling Langague Specification (UML 1.4.2, ISO/IEC 19501) (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Rao, A.S., Georgeff, M.P.: An abstract architecture for rational agents. In: Rich, C., Swartout, W., Nebel, B. (eds.) Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, San Mateo, CA, pp. 439–449. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Dam, K.H., Winikoff, M.: Generation of repair plans for change propagation. In: Luck, M., Padgham, L. (eds.) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering VIII. LNCS, vol. 4951, pp. 132–146. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Rao, A.S.: AgentSpeak(L): BDI agents speak out in a logical computable language. In: Perram, J., Van de Velde, W. (eds.) MAAMAW 1996. LNCS, vol. 1038, pp. 42–55. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Moreira, A., Bordini, R.: An operational semantics for a BDI agent-oriented programming language. In: Meyer, J.J.C., Wooldridge, M.J. (eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on Logics for Agent-Based Systems (LABS 2002), April 2002, pp. 45–59 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Winikoff, M., Padgham, L., Harland, J., Thangarajah, J.: Declarative & procedural goals in intelligent agent systems. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2002), Toulouse, France, pp. 470–481 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Dam, K.H., Winikoff, M.: Cost-based BDI plan selection for change propagation. In: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) (2008) (to appear)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: Developing intelligent agent systems: A practical guide. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2004)

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Object Management Group: Meta Object Facility Specification, MOF 1.4 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Dam, K.H., Winikoff, M., Padgham, L.: An agent-oriented approach to change propagation in software evolution. In: Proceedings of the Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC), pp. 309–318. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Mathieson, I., Dance, S., Padgham, L., Gorman, M., Winikoff, M.: An open meteorological alerting system: Issues and solutions. In: Estivill-Castro, V. (ed.) Proceedings of the 27th Australasian Computer Science Conference, Dunedin, New Zealand, pp. 351–358 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Jayatilleke, G.B., Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: A model driven development toolkit for domain experts to modify agent based systems. In: Padgham, L., Zambonelli, F. (eds.) AOSE VII / AOSE 2006. LNCS, vol. 4405, pp. 190–207. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Hassan, A.E., Holt, R.C.: Predicting change propagation in software systems. In: ICSM 2004: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 284–293. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Swanson, E.B.: The dimensions of maintenance. In: ICSE 1976: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Software engineering, pp. 492–497. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1976)

    Google Scholar 

  22. ISO/IEC 14764: Information technology - software maintenance. ISO: Geneva, Switzerland (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Nentwich, C., Capra, L., Emmerich, W., Finkelstein, A.: xlinkit: a consistency checking and smart link generation service. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology 2(2), 151–185 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Fickas, S., Feather, M., Kramer, J. (eds.): Proceedings of the Workshop on Living with Inconsistency, Boston, USA (1997)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Dam, K.H., Winikoff, M. (2009). Evaluating an Agent-Oriented Approach for Change Propagation. In: Luck, M., Gomez-Sanz, J.J. (eds) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering IX. AOSE 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5386. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01338-6_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01338-6_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-01337-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-01338-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics