A methodology for AUML role modeling

Abstract

An agent can play one or more roles. A role is a specific behavior to be played by an agent, defined in terms of permission, responsibilities, activities, and of its interactions with other roles. An agent plays a role by actualizing the behavior in terms of services to be activated and de-activated in dependence of specific pre-condition and post-conditions. So the need to develop a model representing formally role of an agent and its interaction with other agent is valuable. The need for a role model that expresses how agent assumes and change roles is essential and AUML is not completely supportive. The core parts of AUML are interaction protocol diagrams and agent class diagrams, which are extensions of UML's sequence diagrams and class diagrams, respectively. Agents are assigned to roles, belong to classes and an Interaction Protocol diagram shows interactions between these agents roles along a timeline. So, the majority of AUML problems are the lack of: (1) agent role definition methodology, (2) formal semantics to AUML role diagrams, (3) responsibilities (internal) agent role definition (only the external role is defined by sequence diagram), and the agent role control over the time. In this paper, we propose a solution to the above problems. We start by analyzing some significant actual approaches to agent role modeling, we introduce an enhancement to AUML by an agent role definition methodology, and we end by comparing our contribution with similar works.