Agent Oriented

A software system whose primary orientation is towards SoftwareAgents.

An approach to RequirementsEngineering pioneered by Professor Eric Yu at the University of Toronto, under the name of the i* Modelling Framework. See: http://istar.rwth-aachen.de/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=2.

An approach to SoftwareDevelopment. John Mylopoulos (also at the University of Toronto) and others have used i* as a basis for their Tropos software development methodology. See: http://www.troposproject.org.

i* represents "distributed intention". As EricYu? puts it:

: "The complexity of today's systems and our expectations on them have grown to a point where a social paradigm for modelling and analysis has become more appropriate than the traditional mechanistic paradigms. A requirements modelling approach centred around a concept of agent can offer powerful new ways for characterizing and analyzing the interactions and relationships among the many semi-autonomous entities in the system and in the environment. Based on observations about the changing needs of requirements modelling, we propose six properties that are desirable for a concept of agent as a modelling construct: intentionality, autonomy, sociality, contingent identity and boundaries, strategic reflectivity, and rational self-interest."

See: ftp://ftp.cs.utoronto.ca/pub/eric/WIj.pdf