Agent UML Notation for

From the earliest days of multiagent system development, the need has existed for both a methodology and a modeling notation that assist in design. The Agent UML community has responded by developing the AUML notation — a UML profile dedicated to agents that tries to simplify the transition from software engineering to multiagent system engineering. Many modeling notations, rangingfrom temporal and linear logic toUML-based notations such as MESSAGE/UML1 have emerged for mul-tiagent system development since Shoham’s seminal first work.2 UML3 offers many advantages because it is widely used in industrial software pro-jects and tools are available for this notation. Moreover, nonmathematician designers can understand it. As Odell and colleagues indicated, starting over with a new modeling language for agents would be neither useful nor productive.4 Instead, multiagent systems would ben-efit from an incremental extension of existing trusted methods. Agent UML provides such a solution. The idea behind AUML is to exploit UML extension capa-bilities such as stereotypes and con-straints. AUML crystallizes a growing concern for agent-based modeling repre-sentations and lets designers move smoothly from software development to agent development. AUML first appeared in 1999 in Bauer’s proposal on interaction proto-cols.5 Between 1999 and 2002, the AUML community proposed three speci-fications (agent interaction protocols, agent class diagrams, and social struc-tures). Today, the community is pushing to define AUML with the UML 2.0 spec-ification and to standardize it within the Foundation for Intelligent, Physical Agents (www.fipa.org). This article pre-sents the FIPA modeling technical com-mittee’s current efforts and future agen-da for AUML. Agent design with AUML is still developing, so we only present it in part. Please visit the AUML Web site (www.auml.org) for the most up-to-date materials