By James Odell, H. Van Dyke Parunak and Bernhard Bauer
Gaining wide acceptance for the use of agents in industry requires both relating it to the nearest antecedent technology (object-oriented software development) and using artifacts to support the development environment throughout the full system lifecycle. We address both of these requirements in this paper by describing some of the most common requirements for modeling agents and agent-based systems—using a set of UML idioms and extensions. This paper illustrates the approach by presenting a three-layer AUML representation for agent interaction protocols and concludes by including other useful agent-based extensions to UML.
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is gaining wide acceptance for the representation of engineering artifacts in object-oriented software. Our view of agents as the next step beyond objects leads us to explore extensions to UML and idioms within UML to accommodate the distinctive requirements of agents. The result is an Agent UML (AUML). Section 2 provides background information on agent design methods in general, on UML, and on the need for AUML. Section 3 introduces a layered approach to representing agent protocols in AUML. Templates and packages provide a high-level summary (Section 4), sequence diagrams and collaboration diagrams furnish alternative views of the interactions among agents (Section 5), and state diagrams and activity diagrams detail the internal behavior of individual agents in executing protocols (Section 6). Section 7 proposes some other UML extensions that represent several commonly used notions employed by the agent community.
Gaining wide acceptance for the use of agents in industry requires both relating it to the nearest antecedent technology (object-oriented software development) and using artifacts to support the development environment throughout the full system lifecycle. We address both of these requirements in this paper by describing some of the most common requirements for modeling agents and agent-based systems—using a set of UML idioms and extensions. This paper illustrates the approach by presenting a three-layer AUML representation for agent interaction protocols and concludes by including other useful agent-based extensions to UML.
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is gaining wide acceptance for the representation of engineering artifacts in object-oriented software. Our view of agents as the next step beyond objects leads us to explore extensions to UML and idioms within UML to accommodate the distinctive requirements of agents. The result is an Agent UML (AUML). Section 2 provides background information on agent design methods in general, on UML, and on the need for AUML. Section 3 introduces a layered approach to representing agent protocols in AUML. Templates and packages provide a high-level summary (Section 4), sequence diagrams and collaboration diagrams furnish alternative views of the interactions among agents (Section 5), and state diagrams and activity diagrams detail the internal behavior of individual agents in executing protocols (Section 6). Section 7 proposes some other UML extensions that represent several commonly used notions employed by the agent community.
