My most recent research work resides in the overlapping areas of agent-oriented software engineering, product-line software engineering and software safety analysis. To address this, Dr. Robyn Lutz and I have developed techniques and tools for performing software safety analysis for software product lines and have incorporated software product-line engineering ideas into the analysis, design and development of multi-agent systems. Integrating these two bodies of work, we are providing software engineers with an agent-oriented software engineering methodology viable for building safety-critical multi-agent systems that exploit highly-similar agents so that reuse is possible during both initial system implementation and system evolution as well as incorporating safety analysis mechanisms so that safety analysis assets can be derived for the use in discovering and verifying safety requirements and strengthening a safety case when a certification process is warranted.

This research was partly supported by the National Science Foundation grants 0204139, 0205588 and 0541163 and by the Iowa Space Grant Consortium.

More generally, my research areas of interest include:

• software safety analysis techniques
• software product-line engineering
• agent-oriented software engineering
• software engineering tool support
• requirements engineering

A full list of my publications can be found on the Publications page. Please feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss any areas of my research work.

We have begun a collaborative effort with Joaquin Pena at the University of Seville in multi-agent system product lines (MAS-PL) resulting in a contribution to a book chapter.