Developing Role-Based Open Multi-Agent Software Systems
Haiping Xu, Xiaoqin Zhang, R. Patel · 2007
An open multi-agent system (MAS) is a dynamic system in which agents can not only join or leave an agent society at will, but also take or release roles at runtime. Traditional multi-agent system development methodologies are not suitable for developing open multi-agent systems because they assume a fixed number of agents that are specified during the system analysis phase. In this paper, we propose a formal role-based modeling framework for open multi-agent software systems. We specify role organizations and role spaces as containers of conceptual roles and role instances, respectively, where role instances can be dynamically taken or released by agents from agent societies. To support rapid development of role-based open multi-agent systems, we introduce a three-layered design model of open MAS, and developed a prototype Role-based Agent Development Environment (RADE). Finally, we present a case study to demonstrate how an open MAS application can be efficiently built on RADE.