Model-driven engineering techniques for the development of multi-agent systems

Abstract

Model-driven engineering (MDE), implicitly based upon meta-model principles, is gaining more and more attention in software systems due to its inherent benefits. Its use normally improves the quality of the developed systems in terms of productivity, portability, inter-operability and maintenance. Therefore, its exploitation for the development of multi-agent systems (MAS) emerges in a natural way. In this paper, agent-oriented software development (AOSD) and MDE paradigms are fully integrated for the development of MAS. Meta-modeling techniques are explicitly used to speed up several phases of the process. The Prometheus methodology is used for the purpose of validating the proposal. The metaobject facility (MOF) architecture is used as a guideline for developing a MAS editor according to the language provided by Prometheus methodology. Firstly, an Ecore meta-model for Prometheus language is developed. Ecore is a powerful tool for designing model-driven architectures (MDA). Next, facilities provided by the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) are used to generate the graphical editor. It offers support to develop agent models conform to the meta-model specified. Afterwards, it is also described how an agent code generator can be developed. In this way, code is automatically generated using as input the model specified with the graphical editor. A case of study validates the method put in practice for the development of a multi-agent surveillance system.

Interoperability of MAS DSMLs via horizontal model transformations

“…Another DSML was provided for MASs in [17]. The abstract syntax was presented using the Meta-object Facility (MOF) 11 , the concrete syntax and its tool was provided with Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) 12 , and finally the code generation for the JACK agent platform was realized with model transformations using Eclipse JET 13 .…”

“…Due to the difficulty encountered on repeating those vertical model transformation steps, current MAS DSML proposals (e.g. [13][14][15], [17], [19]) mostly support the execution of modeled agents on just one agent platform. Rarely, two different platforms are supported (e.g.…”

“…Differentiating from the existing MAS DSML studies (e.g. [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.…”

“…Proposed MAS DSMLs such as [13], [17], [19] usually support modelling both the static and the dynamic aspects of agent software from different MAS viewpoints including agent internal behaviour model, interaction with other agents, use of other environment entities, etc. Within this context, abstract syntaxes of the languages are represented with metamodels covering those aspects and required viewpoints to some extent.…”

“…specific modeling languages (DSMLs) (e.g. [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]) for facilitating the development of MASs. DSLs / DSMLs [21][22][23] have notations and constructs tailored toward a particular application domain (e.g.…”