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Abstract for Agent-Oriented Methodologies

Agent-oriented methodologies are in their infancy. There is extensive deliberation as to whether these should be enhancements of OO methodologies or be created ab initio. Here we argue that the lessons learned in both object technology and method engineering can be useful in devising new agent-oriented methodologies. We will use as our basis the OPEN Process Framework (OPF) , which is an OO metamodel-based framework consisting of a set of process components stored in a repository. Individual selections are then made from that repository in order to create a personalized process for software development by use of method engineering techniques. Originally targeted at object technology, the OPF has been recently extended to support agent-oriented information systems. We find that although much work has to be done to deal with autonomous components, the scope of the OPEN Process Framework is adequate to absorb this new work. Furthermore, there has been no need to perturb the existing Framework in accommodating these new ideas.

Brief bio for Dr. Brian Henderson-Sellers

BRIAN HENDERSON-SELLERS is Director of the Centre for Object Technology Applications and Research and Professor of Information Systems at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). He is author of eleven books on object technology and is well-known for his work in OO methodologies (MOSES, COMMA, OPEN, OOSPICE) and in OO metrics. Brian has been Regional Editor of Object-Oriented Systems, a member of the editorial board of Object Magazine/Component Strategies and Object Expert for many years and is currently on the editorial board of Journal of Object Technology and Software and Systems Modelling. He was the Founder of the Object-Oriented Special Interest Group of the Australian Computer Society (NSW Branch) and Chairman of the Computerworld Object Developers' Awards committee for ObjectWorld 94 and 95 (Sydney). He is a frequent, invited speaker at international OT conferences. In 1999, he was voted number 3 in the Who's Who of Object Technology (Handbook of Object Technology, CRC Press, Appendix N). He is currently a member of the Review Panel for the OMG's Software Process Engineering Model (SPEM) standards initiative and is a member of the UML2.0 review team. In July 2001, Professor Henderson-Sellers was awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) from the University of London for his research contributions in object-oriented methodologies.


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