A platform-independent metamodel for multiagent systems

Abstract

Various agent-oriented methodologies and metamodels exist to design and develop multiagent systems (MAS) in an abstract manner. Frequently, these frameworks specialise on particular parts of the MAS and only few works have been invested to derive a common standardisation. This limits the impact of agent-related systems in commercial applications. In this paper, we present a metamodel for agent systems that abstracts from existing agent-oriented methodologies, programming languages, and platforms and could thus be considered as platform-independent. This metamodel defines the abstract syntax of a proposed domain-specific modelling language for MAS that is currently under development and provides furthermore the base to generate code out of the generated designs. This is done by applying the principles of model-driven development (MDD) and providing two model transformations that allow transforming the generated models into textual code that can be executed with JACK and JADE.

Interoperability of MAS DSMLs via horizontal model transformations

“…Rarely, two different platforms are supported (e.g. [5], [9]) and as far as we know, there is no any MAS DSML which provides an operational semantics for more than two different agent execution platforms. In order to increase the platform variety, we propose benefiting from the vertical transformations already existing between the syntax of a MAS DSML (let us call DSML1) and metamodels of various agent platforms for enabling model instances of another MAS DSML (let us call DSML 2 ) executable on the same agent platforms by just constructing horizontal transformations between the PIMMs of the MAS DSMLs in question.…”

“…[4][5][6][7]), which include fundamental entities and relations of agent systems. In addition, many model-driven agent development approaches are provided such as [8][9][10] and by enriching MAS metamodels with some defined syntax and semantics (usually translational semantics [11]), researchers also propose domain-specific languages (DSLs) / domain- This study is funded by the Scientific Research Projects Directorate of Ege University under grant 16-UBE-001.…”

“…When we take into account the different abstractions covered by the metamodels of MAS DSMLs and the underlying agent execution platforms, DSML metamodels can be accepted as the platform-independent metamodels (PIMMs) of agent systems while metamodels of the agent execution platforms are platform-specific metamodels (PSMMs) according to the OMG's well-known Modeldriven Architecture (MDA) 4 as also indicated in [5] and [9]. Above described methodology applied in the current MAS DSML development approaches for the derivation of operational semantics unfortunately requires the definition and implementation of new M2M and M2T transformations from scratch in order to make the DSMLs functional for different agent execution platforms.…”

“…[13], [16], [17], [19], [20]), our proposal is based on determining entity mappings and building horizontal M2M transformations between the metamodels of MAS DSMLs which are in the same abstraction level. In this paper, we also investigate the applicability of the proposed DSML interoperability approach by constructing horizontal transformations between two full-fledged agent DSMLs called SEA_ML [19] and DSML4MAS [5] respectively.…”

Construction of Intelligent Virtual Worlds Using a Grammatical Framework

“…This lack of unified system to define the graphical and the behavioral aspects of the system makes some problems arise, such as the difficult reproduction of the results provided by the MAS [2], the lack of a suitable visual representation or the limited capabilities of interaction with the user and with the environment. Some new contributions try to describe multi-agent meta-models to standardize the design, simplify the implementation and integrate the agent frameworks into a single tool [7]. MAS could take advantage of the wide research carried out in this fields to develop VR systems.…”