Xipho: Extending Tropos to Engineer Context-Aware Personal Agents

We introduce Xipho, an agent-oriented methodology for engineering context-aware personal agents (CPAs). Xipho extends Tropos to support CPA development. Xipho's steps span a CPA's requirements acquisition, design, and implementation. Importantly, we treat context as a cognitive notion and systematically relate it to other cognitive notions such as goals and plans. Xipho incorporates reusable components in a CPA's design and implementation to simplify the development process. We evaluate Xipho empirically, finding that Xipho reduces development time and effort, and improves the comprehensibility of CPA designs.