FIPA Methodology Technical Committee

	FIPA Methodology Technical Committee
	Working Area
	*Home Guideline Glossary Meta-model Method Base Members List*

News:

The activity of the FIPA Methodology Technical Committee stopped during the transition towards the new FIPA structure. The organization of a new working/study group is under way, please contact M. Cossentino (see below) for more detailed news.
Budapest meeting (Sept, 2005) outcome: see here.
14-07-05: Next FIPA IEEE meeting will be in Budapest in September, 13-14th. We plan to have a meeting of this working group during the event.
15-05-05: FIPA is closing as a Swiss-based organization and moving under the IEEE Computer Society with the name IEEE FIPA Standards Committee (see FIPA and IEEE page). This (old FIPA) TC will become a working group of the new IEEE committee.
13-03-05: The AgentLink III AOSE TFG (Technical Forum Group) has debated about an unifying MAS meta-model during its last meeting in Ljubljana. Results can be found in the AOSE TF2 website.
25-11-04: site updates: New page on guidelines; resolutions of Washington meeting; new draft of the fragment repository doc (see page on method base); new reference papers; many new members have been added in the members list page (let me know if I forgot someone)
13-11-04: This TC activity will continue during FIPA reorganization.

This FIPA Technical Committee will focus on the identification of a methodology for developing of multi-agent systems.

Existing development methodologies have different advantages when applied to specific problems. It is therefore possible to think that the developer of a MAS would like to use phases or models or elements coming from different methodologies in order to build up a personalized approach for his own problem.

In order to reuse contributions coming from existing methodologies we will adopt the method engineering (see the metamodel page for some references) as the referring paradigm. In this context the development methodology is constructed by the developer assembling pieces of the process (method fragments) from a method base. In this way he/she could obtain the best process for his/her specific need/problem.

We will take method fragments (the composing elements of the development methodology) from several existing methodologies like: AOR, Cassiopeia, Gaia, Mase, Message, PASSI, Tropos, and so on, if these fragments are coherent with the FIPA architecture. Other novel and specific contributions will be considered as well.

Chair	Massimo Cossentino (ICAR/CNR),
Co-Chair	Radovan Cervenka (Whitestein Technologies), rce@whitestein.com
TC plan	Plan of the TC (.doc, 51KB)
TC members	Members list
TC Meetings	1) Palermo, 10-12 Feb. 2003 (report) 2) London, 18-21 Nov. 2003 (report) 3) Barcelona, 17-19 Mar 2004 (report, presentation and docs) 4) Washington, 14-16, July 2004 (resolutions and agenda, doc on repository structure (working draft), TC Methodology presentation) 5) Budapest, 13-14, September 2005 (agenda and discussion, resolutions)
Current activities	1) Glossary of development methodologies related terms (first release available at glossary page); 2) Metamodel specification (Fragment Specification here) 3) Identification of the method base architecture 4) Collection of method fragments (first docs available here) 5) Guidelines for methodology composition
Schedule	The activities of this TC will be scheduled as follows:

Chair