Software agents are highly autonomous, situated and interactive software components. They autonomously sense their environment and respond accordingly. Agents behaviours are often constrained by by real time constraints such as the time in which the agent is expected to respond .i.e. time needed for a task to complete. Failing to meet such a constraint can result in a task being not achieved. This possibly causes an agent or a system to fail, depending on how critical the task is to the agent or system as a whole. Our research aims at identifying and modelling real time constraints in the early phase of analysis which helps in creating a more reliable and robust system.

In some areas of software engineering research, there are several metamodels claiming to capture the main issues. Though it is profitable to have variety at the beginning of a research field, after some time, the diversity of metamodels becomes an obstacle, for instance to the sharing of results between research groups. To reach consensus and unification of existing metamodels, metamodel-driven software language engineering can be applied. This paper illustrates an application of software language engineering in the agent-oriented software engineering research domain. Here, we introduce a relatively generic agent-oriented metamodel whose suitability for supporting modeling language development is demonstrated by evaluating it with respect to several existing methodology-specific metamodels. First, the metamodel is constructed by a combination of bottom-up and top-down analysis and best practice. The concepts thus obtained and their relationships are then evaluated by mapping to two agent-oriented metamodels: TAO and Islander. We then refine the metamodel by extending the comparisons with the metamodels implicit or explicit within five more extant agent-oriented approaches: Adelfe, PASSI, Gaia, INGENIAS, and Tropos. The resultant FAML metamodel is a potential candidate for future standardization as an important component for engineering an agent modeling language.

Dynamic evolution is an important phenomenon in distributed systems that undergo changes without being shut down. Examples include 24x7 global financial market systems and mobile phone switching networks. Building and keeping these systems operational requires sound software engineering techniques since system unavailability is extremely expensive and is often prohibited in many business contexts. In this spirit, we present temporal extensions to the UML (Unified Modeling Language) notation to incorporate design concerns for dynamic evolution in distributed system development. In the system structure space, this paper introduces the temporal system structure, the transformational association, the transformational link, and the state transfer map to relate successive changes to each other. In the transformation space, this paper introduces the use of exclusion control to regulate and maintain service continuity during a transformation, and the transformation diagram to specify a transformation per se with respect to time.

TeIemedicine involves the integration of information, telecommunications, human-machine and healthcare technologies. One of the aspects of telecardiology, known as tele-electrocardiography, deploys electrocardiography (ECG) machines to transmit ECGs over networks. Tele-electrocardiography diagnosis and ECG interpretation is simple, reliable and cost-effective. As different parts of this tele-electrocardiography system work on different computing environments, software interoperability is a major issue. Software agent technology supports a heterogeneous computing environment. As this technology reacts dynamically to adverse conditions, it is suitable for the development of fault-tolerant distributed systems. Additionally, agent technology represents the intentions, desires and resources of the participants - so it can be effectively used in online healthcare applications. The features of software agent technology are potentially suitable for the development of interoperable telemedicine systems. This paper presents a software agent-based interoperable scheme for tele-electrocardiography applications.

Effective management of the software development process requires that management be able to estimate total development effort and cost. One of the fundamental problems associated with effort and cost estimation is the a priori estimation of software size. Function point analysis has emerged over the last decade as a popular tool for this task. Criticisms of the method that relate to the way in which function counts are calculated and the impact of the processing complexity adjustment on the function point count have arisen. SPQR/20 function points among others are claimed to overcome some of these criticisms. The SPQR/20 function point method is compared to traditional function point analysis as a measure of software size in an empirical study of MIS environments. In a study of 64 projects in one organization it was found that both methods would appear equally satisfactory. However consistent use of one method should occur since the individual counts differ considerably.>

The authors report the results of an empirical research project on the consistency and limitations of the number of function points as an a priori measure of system size rather than the traditional lines-of-code measure. They conclude that function points are a more consistent a priori measure of system size. The results also indicate that the function-point estimate of size is lower for analysts experienced both in software development and in function-point estimation.>