A Formal Description Language For Multi-Agent Architectures

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) constitute a highly promising software architectural approach for modem application domains such as peer-to-peer and ubiquitous computing, information retrieval, semantic web services or e-business. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining languages for designing such architectures. This paper identifies the foundations for an architectural description language (ADL) to specify multi-agent system architectures. We propose a set of system design concepts based on the BDI (belief-desire-intention) agent model and existing classical ADLs. We conceptualize it with the Z specification language to capture a "core" model of structural and behavioural elements fundamental to an architecture description for BDI-MAS. We partially apply it on a data integration system example to illustrate our proposal.