A holonic metamodel for agent-oriented analysis and design

Holonic multiagent systems (HMAS) offers a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains characterized by a hierarchical structure. However the process of building MASs and HMASs is mostly different from the process of building more traditional software systems and it introduces new design and development issues. Against this background, this paper introduces organization-oriented abstractions for agent-oriented software engineering. We propose a complete organizational meta-model as the basis of a future complete methodology that will spread from requirements analysis to code production. In addition to dealing with this last aspect, we introduce our platform, called Janus, that we specifically designed to implement and deploy holonic multiagent systems by adopting concepts like role and organization as the leading issues of the analysis-development process.