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Exploiting UML in the Design of Multi-agent Systems

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Engineering Societies in the Agents World (ESAW 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1972))

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Abstract

A basic concept of software engineering is that a system can be described at different levels of abstraction. Agent-oriented software engineering introduces a new level of abstraction, called the agent level, to allow software architects modelling a system in terms of interacting agents. This level of abstraction is not yet supported by an accepted diagrammatic notation even if a number of proposals are available. This work shows how UML can be exploited to model a multi-agent system at the agent level. In particular, it presents a set of agent-oriented diagrams intended to provide an UML-based notation to model: the architecture of the multi-agent system, the ontology followed by agents and the interaction protocols used to co-ordinate agents. The presented notation exploits stereotypes to associate an agent-oriented semantic with class and collaboration diagrams. The benefit of using stereotypes rather than extending UML to provide an agent-oriented semantic is that the presented notation can be used with any off-the-shelf CASE tool.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Universitá degli Studi di Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 181A, Parma, Italy

    Federico Bergenti & Agostino Poggi

Authors
  1. Federico Bergenti
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  2. Agostino Poggi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136, Bologna, Italy

    Andrea Omicini

  2. Fachbereich 13 - Informatik, Technische Universität Berlin, Franklinstr. 28/29, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Robert Tolksdorf

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Ingegneria, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Vignolese 905, 41100, Modena, Italy

    Franco Zambonelli

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bergenti, F., Poggi, A. (2000). Exploiting UML in the Design of Multi-agent Systems. In: Omicini, A., Tolksdorf, R., Zambonelli, F. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World. ESAW 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1972. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44539-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44539-0_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41477-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44539-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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