A Tool for Specifying and Validating Agents' Interaction Protocols: From Agent UML to Maude.

Abstract

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.

Twenty years of rewriting logic

“…Formal analysis is impossible or fraudulent without a formal semantics. Early work in developing rewriting-logic-based formal semantics focused on object-oriented design notations and languages [351,352,473], and stimulated subsequent work on UML and UML-like notations, e.g., [33,110,169,197,268,269,[345][346][347]474].…”

“…giving formal semantics to various object-oriented design notations, architectural notations, and software modeling languages, e.g., [33,40,42,[60][61][62]65,66,110,154,169,197,268,269,[345][346][347]363,393,394,474], and 2. giving formal semantics to various middleware and distributed coordination mechanisms, e.g., [13,14,153,167,168,350,402].…”

Modeling UML Template Classes with FoCaLiZe

“…The Maude system [6] is also used in formalizing UML/OCL models such as in [24,25]. To our knowledge, there is no particular work concerning the transformation from UML template and template binding into Maude.…”