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The construction of ad-hoc design processes following the Situational Method Engineering (SME) paradigm is currently carried out by adopting a set of phases for which, until now, no well defined techniques and guidelines have been established. The consequence is that organizations are very dependent on method designers' skills. In this paper, we propose an approach based on SME for constructing customized agent oriented design processes. Our approach adopts the metamodel as the most important factor leading to the selection and assembly of method fragments and an algorithm for establishing the instantiation order of metamodel elements. The algorithm makes the proposed approach repeatable and usable even by not very skilled personnel, thus proposing an improvement to the actual situation. The proposed approach and the algorithm are also experimented through the construction of a design process (ASPECS) for developing dynamic hierarchical societies of agents. The approach we created is general enough to be applied in other development contexts (not only agent-oriented).

The construction of ad-hoc design processes is more and more required today. In this paper we present our approach for the construction of a new design process following the Situational Method Engineering paradigm. We mainly focus on the selection and assembly activities on the base of what we consider a key element in agent design processes: the MAS metamodel. The paper presents an algorithm establishing a priority order in the realization (instantiation) of MAS metamodel elements by the fragments that will compose the new process.