Title: Model integration in agent-oriented development

Authors: Ruben Fuentes-Fernandez, Jorge J. Gomez-Sanz, Juan Pavon

Addresses: Dep. Ingenieria del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, c/ Professor Jose Garcia Santesmases s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain. ' Dep. Ingenieria del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, c/ Professor Jose Garcia Santesmases s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain. ' Dep. Ingenieria del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, c/ Professor Jose Garcia Santesmases s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Abstract: Each current agent-oriented methodology focuses on some aspects of multi-agent systems and may leave others aside. For this reason, a developer may find it useful to apply different specialised methods and tools for each aspect of the system under development. Nevertheless, the integration of different elements into a specification is not trivial. This paper proposes addressing this issue by using mappings between different modelling languages and an intermediate language. The use of this intermediate language called Unified Modelling Language for Activity Theory (UML-AT), reduces the number of required mappings. Being rooted in the Activity Theory (AT) framework, which comes from social sciences, UML-AT supports most of the key agent-related concepts found in literature. The application of this integration approach is illustrated with a case study about the implementation of Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) protocols. The case study involves the use of a software support tool for the translation.

Keywords: method engineering; integrated development; conceptual mappings; activity theory; unified modelling language; UML-AT; UML; agent-oriented software engineering; multi-agent systems; intelligent agents; agent-based systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOSE.2007.013263

International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2007 Vol.1 No.1, pp.2 - 27

Published online: 18 Apr 2007 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article