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A metamodeling approach for the identification of organizational smells in multi-agent systems: application to ASPECS

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Abstract

Software Quality is one of the most important subjects in the Process Development Software, especially in large and complex systems. Much effort has been devoted to the development of techniques and concepts to improve software quality over the years. We are especially interested on smells, which represent anomalies or flaws in the design/code that can have serious consequences in maintenance or future development of the systems. These techniques have a strong development in the Object Oriented paradigm, however, very few studies were conducted in the agent oriented paradigm. In this paper we focus on the detection of design smells applied to multi-agent systems models based on the organizational approach, named Organizational Design Smells (ODS). Early and automatic detection of these ODS allows reducing the costs and development times, while increasing the final product’s quality. To achieve this objective, validation rules were defined based in the EVL language. The approach is illustrated with two examples, their validation rules, and the refactoring solutions proposed.

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Notes

  1. Graphical Modeling Framework, http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/gmp.

  2. Epsilon Validation Language, www.eclipse.org/epsilon/doc/evl/.

  3. Eclipse Modeling Project, www.eclipse.org/modeling/.

  4. Object Management Group, www.omg.org.

  5. Agent Oriented Test Driven Development.

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Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thank Gilda Moreno and Nicolás Majorel Padilla for their reviews and suggestions to this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GITIA, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional - Facultad Regional Tucumán, Rivadavia 1050, San Miguel de Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina

    Pedro Araujo & Sebastián Rodríguez

  2. IRTES-SeT, Université de Technologie Belfort-Montbéliard, Rue Ernest Thierry-Mieg, 90010, Belfort cedex, France

    Vincent Hilaire

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  1. Pedro Araujo
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Correspondence to Pedro Araujo.

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Araujo, P., Rodríguez, S. & Hilaire, V. A metamodeling approach for the identification of organizational smells in multi-agent systems: application to ASPECS. Artif Intell Rev 49, 183–210 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-016-9521-7

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