Providing agent support for collaborative systems: using a domain-oriented design method

摘要

This paper describes an approach for designing software agents to support collaborative business systems. It proposes that agent-supported collaborative systems can be economically built using reusable agents. The paper defines a way to identify such generic agents and integrate them into development methodologies. Such reusable agents must be based on concepts that can apply to a wide range of collaborative systems. To do this the paper defines a collaborative metamodel to describe collaborative work and identifies generic agents based on the metamodel concepts. The paper then describes a methodology that defines systems as object models in terms of the metamodel concepts. It then supports each object with the corresponding agent.