The System Requirements model aims at exploring the problem by identifying an agent-oriented perspective that could enable a straight solution that will be detailed in the following models. This analysis point of view could not be lacking of a structural description of the identified agents that is depicted in form of a class diagram at a social abstraction level (all agents are reported together with their interactions). The Agent Structure Exploration phase, in facts, collects the results of the previous phases and represents the agents in forms of classes and their behavioral capabilities (tasks) as class methods. These tasks are the structural implementation of the external manifestations produced by agents in scenarios of the RId phase. They are both methods used to interact with other agents and to accomplish other agent’s duties.
The next figure reports a portion of an Agent Structure Exploration (ASE) diagram. Each agent is shown as a class and its tasks are reported as methods of the class. Communications are represented by relationships among agents and their name is used to identify them throughout all the remaining part of the project. Agent knowledge is usually neglected here since at this stage we still lack of any study about its structure and therefore it could be confusing to attempt an hypothesis without the guidance of an ontology exploration of the domain as it will be performed in the following DOD phase.
Next phase: Task Specification
Previous phase: Role Identification
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