1. ¹School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, U.K.
2. ²School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast, U.K.

Correspondence: Liang Xiao, School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, U.K. Tel: +44 23 8059 5415; Fax: +44 23 8059 2865; E-mail: lx@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Received 30 November 2006; Revised 25 April 2007; Accepted 27 July 2007.

Abstract

Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) supports the transformation from reusable models to executable software. Business representations, however, cannot be fully and explicitly represented in such models for direct transformation into running systems. Thus, once business needs change, the language abstractions used by MDA (e.g. object constraint language/action semantics), being low level, have to be edited directly. We therefore describe an agent-oriented MDA (AMDA) that uses a set of business models under continuous maintenance by business people, reflecting the current business needs and being associated with adaptive agents that interpret the captured knowledge to behave dynamically. Three contributions of the AMDA approach are identified: (1) to Agent-oriented Software Engineering, a method of building adaptive Multi-Agent Systems; (2) to MDA, a means of abstracting high-level business-oriented models to align executable systems with their requirements at runtime; (3) to distributed systems, the interoperability of disparate components and services via the agent abstraction.