Extended Modeling Languages for Interaction Protocol Design

Successful development of agent interaction protocols requires modeling methods and tools that support a relatively complete development lifecycle. Agent-based systems are inherently complex but exhibit many similarities to object-oriented systems. For these reasons not only current modeling languages need to be extended, but also related tools should be provided for agent interaction protocol design to be supported. In this paper, we focus on the design stage of an agent interaction protocol development cycle. We start by giving general criteria for comparing agent modeling languages. The ones we take into consideration in this paper are extensions of Agent-UML and FIPA-UAML languages. We describe these languages and discuss some extensions on a simplified application of the Netbill electronic commerce protocol. We then briefly introduce a component-based formal specification language in order to support the protocol's design stage and present a tool built upon the FIPA norm (making use of the PDN or UAML notation) which supports the analysis and design of interaction protocols.