A Tool for Specifying and Validating Agents' Interaction Protocols: From Agent UML to Maude.
Farid Mokhati, Brahim Sahraoui, Soufiane Bouzaher, Mohamed Tahar Kimour · The Journal of Object Technology · 2010
To achieve the multi-agent systems' goals, agents interact to exchange information, to cooperate and to coordinate their tasks.Interaction is generally recognized as an important characteristic of multi-agent systems (MAS).The usual approaches to model agents' interactions consist of describing them as protocols [Hug04].In the literature, several representation formalisms of agents' interactions have been proposed.AUML is one among the most used formalisms [Hug02].However, AUML diagrams only offer a semi-formal specification of interactions.Indeed, the lack of formal semantics in AUML, can lead to several incoherencies in the description of a MAS' behaviour.We present, in this paper, a visual tool that essentially allows: (1) translating the description of agents' interaction protocols (AIP), specified by means of AUML formalism, in a Maude specification and, (2) validating the generated formal descriptions through simulation.Based on rewriting logic, the formal and object-oriented language Maude offers an interesting way for concurrent systems formal specification and programming.By an example of multi-agent systems interaction protocol, we illustrate the proposed translation and the developed tool.