RADE: Role-Based Agent Development Environment

PI: Haiping Xu
Concurrent Software Engineering Laboratory (CSEL)
Computer and Information Science Department
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

July 1, 2007

Overview

An open multi-agent system (MAS) is a dynamic system in which agents can not only join or leave an agent society at will, but also take or release roles at runtime. Traditional multi-agent system development methodologies are not suitable for developing open multi-agent systems because they assume a fixed number of agents that are specified during the system analysis phase. In order to develop role-based open multi-agent systems, we propose a formal role-based modeling framework for open multi-agent software systems. We specify role organizations and role spaces as containers of conceptual roles and role instances, respectively, where role instances can be dynamically taken or released by agents from agent societies. To support rapid development of role-based open multi-agent systems, we introduce a three-layered design model of open MAS, and developed a prototype Role-based Agent Development Environment (RADE).

Collaborator

Xiaoqin Zhang (Co-PI), Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Publications

Xiaoqin Zhang, Haiping Xu, and Bhavesh Shrestha, "Building a Health Care Multi-agent Simulation System with Role-Based Modeling," In R. Paranjape and A. Sadanand (Eds.), Multi-Agent Systems for Health Care Simulation and Modeling: Applications for System Improvement, Chapter VI, IGI Global, August 2009 (Book Info).
Haiping Xu, Xiaoqin Zhang, and Rinkesh J. Patel, "Developing Role-Based Open Multi-Agent Software Systems," International Journal of Computational Intelligence Theory and Practice (IJCITP), June 2007, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 39-56.
Xiaoqin Zhang, Haiping Xu, and Bhavesh Shrestha, "An Integrated Role-Based Approach for Modeling, Designing and Implementing Multi-Agent Systems," Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society (JBCS), Special Issue on Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems, July 2007, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 45-60.
Xiaoqin Zhang, Haiping Xu, and Bhavesh Shrestha, "Developing Multi-Agent Systems with Automatic Agent Generation and Dynamic Task Allocation Mechanisms," In Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2007), May 14-18, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, pp. 1246-1248.
Xiaoqin Zhang and Haiping Xu, "Towards Automated Development of Multi-Agent Systems Using RADE," In Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI'06), June 26-29, 2006, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, pp. 44-50.
Haiping Xu and Xiaoqin Zhang, "A Methodology for Role-Based Modeling of Open Multi-Agent Software Systems," In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2005), May 24-28, 2005, Miami, Florida, USA, pp. 246-253.