A platform-independent model for agents

Various agent-oriented methodologies and metamodels exist to describe multiagent systems ([VIAS) in an abstract manner. Frequently, these frameworks specialize on particular parts of the MAS and only few works have been invested to derive a common standardization. This limits t he impact of agent-related systems in commercial applications. In this paper, we present a metamodel for agent systems that abstract from existing agent-oriented methodologies and platforms and could thus be called platform-independent. This metamodel provides the core language that is used in our agentoriented software development process that conforms to the principles of Model-Driven Developrnent (MDD). Beside the domain-specific modelling language, we further provide two model transformations that allow to transform the generated models into textual code that call be executed with JACK and JADE

OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Metamodel for Jason BDI Agents

In this paper, a metamodel, which can be used for modeling Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents working on Jason platform, is introduced. The metamodel provides the modeling of agents with including their belief bases, plans, sets of events, rules and actions respectively. We believe that the work presented herein contributes to the current multi-agent system (MAS) metamodeling efforts by taking into account another BDI agent platform which is not considered in the existing platform-specific MAS modeling approaches. A graphical concrete syntax and a modeling tool based on the proposed metamodel are also developed in this study. MAS models can be checked according to the constraints originated from the Jason metamodel definitions and hence conformance of the instance models is supplied by utilizing the tool. Use of the syntax and the modeling tool are demonstrated with the design of a cleaning robot which is a well-known example of Jason BDI architecture

A Multiagent System for Production Synchronization in SME Mecatronics Supply Chain

International audienceWe present in this paper the application of multiagent system (MAS) for modelling and simulation of the dynamic structure and behaviour of the supply chain in SMEs mechatronic context in Savoie. First, a short literature overview describes the context and the contribution of multiagent modelling for SMEs integration. In the rest of the paper, the supply chain concepts and their agentification are presented. On the basis of this correspondence, we propose a synchronization protocol for the operational system (production flow and resources)

Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem, we propose an application-independent model of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. With respect to other approaches to artificial (or electronic) institutions, which mainly focus on the definition of the normative component of open systems, our proposal has a wider scope, in that we model the social context of the interaction, define the semantics of an Agent Communication Language to operate on such a context, and give an operational definition of the norms that are necessary to constrain the agents’ actions. In particular, we define the semantics of a library of communicative acts in terms of operations on agents’ social reality, more specifically on commitments, and regard norms as event-driven rules that, when fired by events happening in the system, create or modify a set of commitments. An interesting aspect of our proposal is that both the definition of the ACL and the definition of norms are based on the same notion of commitment. Therefore an agent capable of reasoning on commitments can reason both on the semantics of communicative acts and on the normative system

Metamodeling Techniques Applied to the Design of Reconfigurable Control Applications

In order to realize autonomous manufacturing systems in environments characterized by high dynamics and high complexity of task, it is necessary to improve the control system modelling and performance. This requires the use of better and reusable abstractions. In this paper, we explore the metamodel techniques as a foundation to the solution of this problem. The increasing popularity of model-driven approaches and a new generation of tools to support metamodel techniques are changing software engineering landscape, boosting the adoption of new methodologies for control application development

Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Software agents' ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents' interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent metamodel of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the performance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents' action

Development of a Graphical Tool to integrate the Prometheus AEOlus methodology and Jason Platform

Software Engineering (SE) is an area that intends to build high-quality software in a systematic way. However, traditional software engineering techniques and methods do not support the demand for developing Multiagent Systems (MAS). Therefore a new subarea has been studied, called Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). The AOSE area proposes solutions to issues related to the development of agent oriented systems. There is still no standardization in this subarea, resulting in several methodologies. Another issue of this subarea is that there are very few tools that are able to automatically generate code. In this work we propose a tool to support the Prometheus AEOlus Methodology because it provides modelling artifacts to all MAS dimensions: agents, environment, interaction, and organization. The tool supports all Prometheus AEOlus artifacts and can automatically generated code to the agent and interaction dimensions in the AgentSpeak Language, which is the language used in the Jason Platform. We have done some validations with the proposed tool and a case study is presented