An Aspect-Oriented Modeling Framework for Designing Multi-Agent Systems

A number of concerns in multi-agent system (MAS) design have a crosscutting impact on agent-oriented models. These concerns inherently affect several system agents and their internal modeling elements, such as actions and goals. Examples of crosscutting concerns in MAS design encompass both internal and systemic properties, such as learning, mobility, error handling, and security. Without an explicit modeling of such MAS properties, designers can not properly communicate and reason about them and their broadly-scoped effects. This paper presents a meta-modeling framework for supporting the modular representation of crosscutting concerns in agent-oriented design. The framework is centered on the notion of aspects to describe these concerns. It also defines new composition operators to enable the specification on how aspects affect the agent goals and actions. The proposed framework is a result of our previous experience in both using aspect-oriented techniques for MAS design and implementation, and integrating aspect-oriented abstractions in an agent-oriented modeling language, called ANote.