Automatic Synthesis of Agent Designs in UML

Abstract

It is anticipated that the UML, perhaps with domain-specific extensions, will increasingly be used to model and analyse agent-based systems. Current commercial tools for UML, however, contain a number of gaps that limit this growth potential. As an example, there is little or no support for automatic translations between UML notations. We present one such translation — from sequence diagrams to statecharts — and discuss how such an algorithm could be used in agent modeling. In contrast to other approaches, our algorithm makes a justified merging of the input sequence diagrams based on simple logical specifications of messages passed between agents/objects, and detects conflicting behaviors in different sequence diagrams. In addition, we generate statecharts that make full use of hierarchy, leading to generated designs that more closely resemble those which a designer might produce. This is important in the context of iterative design, since the designer will likely want to modify the generated statecharts to refine their behavior.