Implementing agent communication languages directly from UML specifications

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modeling Language as a formalism for defining the abstract syntax of agent communication languages and their associated content languages, with implementations for specific programming languages and message serialization formats generated automatically from these models. This eliminates the error-prone manual process of generating compatible language bindings and message encodings for different implementations of a language and, by decoupling these issues from the implementation of other agent code, provides a framework for specifying and experimenting with alternative agent communication languages. The approach is illustrated by an automatically generated application programmer interface in Java for processing strongly-typed messages and serializing them using RDF.

REFERENCES

• 1: S. Cranefield, M. Nowostawski, and M. Purvis. A proposal for a strongly-typed ACR framework. Input Document f-in-00048, Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. http://www.\ob fipa.\ob org/\ob docs/\ob input/\ob f-in-00048/, 2002
• 2: Stephen Cranefield , Martin Purvis, A UML profile and mapping for the generation of ontology-specific content languages, The Knowledge Engineering Review, v.17 n.1, p.21-39, March 2002 [doi>10.1017/S0269888902000309]
• 3: Yannis Labrou , Tim Finin , Yun Peng, Agent Communication Languages: The Current Landscape, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v.14 n.2, p.45-52, March 1999 [doi>10.1109/5254.757631]
• 4: Object Management Group. Unified Modeling Language Specification, version 1.4. http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?formal/ 01-09-67, 2001
• 5: M. Purvis, S. Cranefield, M. Nowostawski, and D. Carter. Opal: A multi-level infrastructure for agent-oriented software development. Discussion Paper 2002/01, Department of Information Science, University of Otago. http://www. otago. ac. nz/ informationscience/ publctns/ complete/ papers/ dp2002-01.pdf.gz, 2002
• 6: World Wide Web Consortium. XSL Transformations (XSLT) specification version 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt, 1999
• 7: World Wide Web Consortium. Resource Description Framework overview Web page, version 1.141. http://www.w3.org/RDF/Overview.html, 2002

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Multiagent systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages