Modeling Multi-Agent Systems using UML

Tropos is a framework which offers an approach to guide the development of multi-agent systems (MAS). It relies on the i* notation to describe both requirements and architectural design. However, the use of i* as an architectural description language (ADL) is not suitable, since it presents some limitations to capture all the information required for designing MAS architectures. Recognizing that the Unified Modeling Language 2.0 (UML) supports software architectural description, in this work we present an extension to the UML metamodel to capture the features of agency to support MAS modeling at the architectural level. In doing so, we define a notation to model MAS architectures. Furthermore, we provide a set of heuristics to describe MAS using our UML-based notation derived from an architectural description using i*. We illustrate our approach by modeling a Conference Management System.