Agent-oriented Software Construction with UML

In the last years, an increasing number of computing systems are being realized taking advantage of autonomous agents. Traditional software engineering methodologies are insufficient to be used in the development of such systems because of the particular characteristics of autonomous agents. Therefore, a lot of work has been done to extend traditional software engineering methodologies for agent systems and its result has been the definition of new methodologies of agent-oriented software engineering. This chapter introduces the basic concepts of agent-oriented software engineering showing the new artefacts that we introduced to analyse, design and implement multi-agent systems. In particular, we present a set of agent-oriented diagrams that support the modelling of: (i) the architecture of the multi-agent system, (ii) the ontology followed by agents and (iii) the interaction protocols used to coordinate agents. These artefacts are described exploiting an UML-based notation that exploits stereotypes to provide agent-oriented semantics to class and collaboration diagrams.