Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
FIPA was a standard proposal for an agent communication language (ACL). [10]
gives and overview of FIPA and related activities. Although FIPA also made pro-
posals for standards for communication protocols
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, execution of such protocols
was rather neglected. In his seminal work [16] investigated formal approaches to
protocol design. Declarative methods to describe protocols have the charm that
the formalisms seem to be clean. However, at least in some cases it is a problem
to find out whether protocols can be enacted [6]. More pragmatic approaches do
not face this problems because protocol execution is directly foreseen, however,
conformance to prescribed behavior is a general problem.
While the areas of general software engineering and agent-oriented software
engineering lived for years without much interaction, in recent years the con-
cepts of the two areas have grown significantly together. A good example for
the common interest is the Agent Platform Special Interest Group of the Object
Management Group (OMG) which has the goal to foster OMG specifications
in the agent area. Other examples are the Agent Modelling Language (AML)
[18] a semi-formal visual modeling language for the definition, modeling, and
documentation of systems that adopt agent technologies. AML is defined as
an extension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML
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)usingthemostim-
portant OMG frameworks. Agent UML (AUML) [2] extended UML sequence
diagrams with interaction protocols. Besides agent-based modeling approaches
several methodologies were proposed (e.g. Tropos [15], Prometheus [14,17]) that
provide mechanisms to support the specification, the analysis, and development
of agent-based systems. Additionally proposals for metamodels for agent-based
systems are on the table (e.g. Gaia [20], PASSi [4], and ADELFE [3]).
Protocol projections have been studied already early in the area of verification
of communication protocols (e.g. [11]). Recently, these techniques are also used
in the context of collaborations [12]. More specifically, projections are used for
generating executable business processes and orchestrations from choreography
descriptions (e.g. [13], [9]), restricted to languages for business process modeling.
7 Conclusions
This article presented a framework for the model driven design of MAS. The
framework is built around the domain specific modelling language DSML4MAS.
The core of DSML4MAS is defined by the metamodel PIM4Agents that includes
platform independent concepts for the design of MAS. PIM4Agents is separated
into 12 major aspects for MAS design. The general framework proposes a plugin
architecture where these different aspects can be replaced or refined in a flexible
manner. In the discussion of the PIM4Agents metamodel the article concentrates
on the Interaction aspect because it is an obvious choice when it comes to reuse of
model fragments in MAS design. The design of interaction protocols is complex
and tedious and therefore reuse of well-understood protocols is highly desirable.
The article presents a proposal how the Interaction aspect in DSML4MAS can
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