Social Analysis of Multi-agent Systems with Activity Theory

The development of software systems is a complex task that requires support techniques to guide the process and solve inconsistencies in its . In the agent paradigm, the use of social and intentional abstractions facilitates the application of these techniques in theories for the analysis of human societies, such as the Activity Theory. The Activity Theory proposes patterns that appear in human groups to explain their behaviour, and the study of their internal contradictions to understand its evolution. These patterns can be translated to the agent paradigm to reason about the behaviour of multi-agent systems. To ease the use of such techniques, a partially automatized process is proposed. The aim is to create an assistant that helps developers in the specification of their multi-agent systems. The use of this tool is evaluated through case studies specified with the INGENIAS notation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CAEPIA
• Authors: Rubén Fuentes, Jorge J. Gómez-Sanz, Juan Pavón
• Keywords: Activity Theory, Agent Paradigm, CAEPIA 2003, Multi-agent Systems