Extending UML to Model Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems (MASs) and object-oriented systems (OOSs) differ in many respects. Traditionally, OOSs are composed of objects whose properties are attributes and methods and interact through method calling. MASs are composed not only of objects but of different elements (such as agents, organizations and others) that have different properties and interact in different ways. MASs require modeling languages, among other agent-based software technologies, that are able to explore the use of agent-related abstractions. Modeling languages should represent the structural (or static) and dynamic aspects of MASs by expressing the characteristics of all its essential entities. Structural aspects comprise the definition of the entities, their properties and their relationships. The dynamic aspects are characterized by the internal execution of the entities and by the interactions between the entities. In this paper we propose to extend the UML modeling language in order to model the structural and dynamic aspects of MASs.