DocumentCode :
1124382
Title :
A framework for model-based design of agent-oriented software
Author :
Xu, Haiping ; Shatz, Sol M.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Illinois Univ., Chicago, IL, USA
Volume :
29
Issue :
1
fYear :
2003
Firstpage :
15
Lastpage :
30
Abstract :
Agents are becoming one of the most important topics in distributed and autonomous decentralized systems, and there are increasing attempts to use agent technologies to develop large-scale commercial and industrial software systems. The complexity of such systems suggests a pressing need for system modeling techniques to support reliable, maintainable, and extensible design. G-nets are a type of Petri net defined to support system modeling in terms of a set of independent and loosely-coupled modules. In this paper, we customize the basic G-net model to define a so-called "agent-based G-net" that can serve as a generic model for agent design. Then, to progress from an agent-based design model to an agent-oriented model, new mechanisms to support inheritance modeling are introduced. To illustrate our formal modeling technique for multiagent systems, an example of an agent family in electronic commerce is provided. Finally, we demonstrate how we can use model checking to verify some key behavioral properties of our agent model. This is facilitated by the use of an existing Petri net tool.
Keywords :
Petri nets; distributed processing; inheritance; multi-agent systems; object-oriented programming; Petri net; agent-based G-net; agent-oriented model; agent-oriented software; autonomous decentralized systems; distributed systems; e-commerce; electronic commerce; extensible design; independent loosely-coupled modules; inheritance modeling; large-scale commercial software systems; large-scale industrial software systems; maintainable design; model-based design framework; multiagent systems; reliable design; Application software; Artificial intelligence; Electronic commerce; Formal languages; Large-scale systems; Multiagent systems; Object oriented modeling; Software design; Software engineering; Software systems;
fLanguage :
English
Journal_Title :
Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
Publisher :
ieee
ISSN :
0098-5589
Type :
jour
DOI :
10.1109/TSE.2003.1166586
Filename :
1166586
Link To Document :
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