Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
already available technologies get adapted to new requirements. Agent technolo-
gies can contribute in this enterprise because they provide helpful abstractions
for the design of complex systems.
In the following we present the ingredients of our approach. Section 2 gives
an overview of the overall approach. In Section 3 we present details of the
PIM4Agents metamodel that forms the core of DSML4MAS. We zoom in on
the interaction aspect of PIM4Agents in Section 4 because this aspect is one of
the most obvious where exchange of models and model fragment among system
engineers is desirable. Section 5 presents uses cases in which we evaluate our
approach and an illustrative example of the use of a concrete interaction model.
Section 6 gives some pointers to related work and Section 7 draws conclusions
and directions for future research.
2 Framework for Model Driven Design of Multiagent
Systems
In this article we adopt a model driven approach to the design of agent-based
systems. The basic ideas of the approach were developed in the EC
2
funded re-
search projects ATHENA
3
and SHAPE
4
and are now further developed in the
EC funded research project COIN
5
. The main achievement in this approach is
the definition of the domain specific modelling language DSML4MAS
6
[7]. The
metamodel PIM4Agents forms the core of DSML4MAS. From PIM4Agents we
derive our modeling tool which is built on the Eclipse EMF/GMF technology
stack [19]. However, we do not only aim at just providing the modelling lan-
guage and tool support. What we want to come up with is a framework that
allows to extend and refine the core metamodel by additional or more special-
ized concepts. For this the metamodel is separated into different parts that deal
with specific concerns of the design of a multiagent system. We refer to these
parts of the metamodel that form separate meaningful entities with the term
aspect
. The idea is to provide a framework that allows to specifically design and
flexibly adapt the different aspects. This approach allows to extend the core of
the metamodel by pluging in different realizations of the foreseen aspects. We
further distinguish between the aspects into which the metamodel is separated
and the different viewpoints that are supported by the modelling tool. A view-
point in the modelling tool is defined by a diagram that displays a collection of
concepts and how they relate to each other. Additionally, a tool box that allows
to manipulate the concepts in the diagram is provided, e.g. add or delete new
instances of a specific concept or introduce additional relations. The overall goal
is to allow both a flexible definition of the aspects in the metamodel as well as
a flexible definition of viewpoints in the modelling tool.
2
European Commission.
