Towards an ADL for Designing Agent-Based Systems
Résumé
In this paper, we describe the Architecture Description Language (ADL) that we are defining for the design of agent-based systems. This aims at filing the gap between the analysis and design phases in agent-oriented methodologies. The analysis phase enables the description of the software architecture without any consideration of the execution environment while the design phase supplements the analysis output with descriptions related to the distributed environment in which the agents will run. The distributed environment we consider is an OMG MASIF compliant mobile agent platform. Our approach provides a UML profile concerning the distribution aspects related to the execution environment for the agent-based systems designers. This work is a part of the ODAC project dealing with the development of a methodology for the construction of agent-based systems. This is based on the ISO Open Distributed Processing standards that define an architectural framework for the construction of distributed systems.