Agent UML : A formalism for specifying multiagent interaction

In the past, research on agent-oriented software engineering had been widely lacking touch with the world of industrial software development. Recently, a cooperation has been established between the Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) and the Object Management Group (OMG) aiming to increase acceptance of agent technology in industry by relating to de facto standards (object-oriented software development) and supporting the development environment throughout the full system lifecycle. As a first result of this cooperation, we proposed AGENT UML [Bauer, 1999; Odell 2000], an extension of the Unified Modeling language (UML), a de facto standard for object-oriented analysis and design. In this paper, we describe the heart of AGENT UML, i.e., mechanisms to model protocols for multiagent interaction. Particular UML extensions described in this paper include protocol diagrams, agent roles, multithreaded lifelines, extended UML message semantics, nested and interleaved protocols, and protocol templates.

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