mainan19's Journal: When Object Orientation is not enough

Object orientation is such a powerful paradigm for software engineering. With this technique, one is able to rely heavily on the modeling of processes such as activity diagrams, event sequence charts, etc. It means that there would be a model of conditions that we would or should know what will happen through the processes. If we look on more detail, the paradigm of object oriented is concerning a development strategy based on the concept that systems should be built from a collection of reusable components called objects. Another explanation about how powerful OO is described by wikipedia. Object-oriented analysis and design (OAD) applies object-modeling techniques to analyze the requirements for a context -- for example, a system, a set of system modules, an organization, or a business unit -- and to design a solution. Most modern object-oriented analysis and design methodologies are use case driven across requirement, design, implementation, testing, and deployment.

As mentioned above, current technique relies heavily on the modeling of processes. Eric Yu describes that the emphasis of the current model (ex. Object oriented) has been on the capture, analysis and specification of what users and clients want in a system [1]. Consistency, completeness, and validation of requirements have been the dominant objectives. However, real-life is not as simple as that. The nature, characteristic and interaction of today's and tomorrow's systems and their environment have become more varied ,dynamic, initiative, complex- distributed, unpredictable, heterogenous, and highly interactive. If I may resume all of above words , it would be : to be much more FLEXIBLE. Also when a system or environment will only have little control and knowledge, it is hard to anticipate all contingencies and be able to know in advance what responses are appropriate. If we look an example in supply chain management, unexpected events can cause delays, wastages, and loss of revenue or customer

[2] explains that current system (ex : OO) produces outputs from inputs, either as pre-defined processes or as reactive responses to control signal or events. Complexity and scalability is primarily dealt with by composition or decomposition, with the behavior of the whole being determined by behavior of the parts together with compositional rules. Those aspects could be seen as a drawback when a system and its environments require autonomy, then above assumptions no longer hold. With autonomy, a entity can choose to cooperate, or not, to varying degrees, and on their own terms or again... can be more flexible J. Thus, a social paradigm is needed to cover the much richer kinds of relationships that exist in such settings rather than sticking with producing outputs from processes based on the simplified entities and environments.

Now, let's play with words :).
The current modeling encapsulates identity ("who"), state ("what entities exist, what activities occur, and what relationships hold"), and passive behavior ("how, if invoked"). Sometimes, those aspects are not enough because it is also important to encapsulate multiple degree of freedom in activity and interaction to know about the "why" aspect. Furthermore, realizing why the entities exist, occur or hold will extend the quality of the business process or, more specialized, the social organizational setting which is made of social actors having (mostly different) goals, abilities, belief, commitment and interests [1]. It can be said that an entity knows why he performs an action and even the "motivation" of an action will be provided based on his goals and beliefs. However, it will also allow having a wrong belief about the world. For example, when we model a business process, we will describe how work entities progress from a process activity to other process activities. In this new model, new aspect is included which is to describe how the actor performing these step relate to each other intentionally, such as in terms of goals, belief, ability and commitment.

I referred to the words flexibility several times.
So, what is flexibility ? (in the terms of the limitation of OO)
[3] define the notion of flexibility is further expanded to incorporate:
- responsiveness : respond to the changes of the environments
- pro-active : do not simply act in response to their environment, they are able to exhibit goal-directed behavior by taking the initiative
- social : should be able to interact in order to complete their own problems and help others with their activities
- autonomy : operate without the direct intervention of humans or others and can not all be assumed to be fully controllable in their behavior due to confilicting interests and non- public individual preferences

In conclusion, Object oriented are inadequate to handle the intentional of the entities and social dimensions, to sense in the incomplete environments and to operate with less intervention from human. Many researchers studied about the limitation of the object orientation and came with new ideas concerning "software agent". They claimed that The software agent can handle many of the problem which OO suffers. They came with the name of distributed artificial technology, agent-based system, multi-agent system, and so on.

For me, the question remains : How powerful is the agent?

Source :

[1] E. S. K. Yu and J. Mylopoulus, From E-R to "A-R" - Modelling Strategic Actor Relationships for Business Process Reengineering

[2] E. Yu, Agent-Oriented Modelling, Software Versus the World
[3] B. Henderson-Sellers and I. Gorton, Agent-based Software Methodologies