Towards the Consolidation of a Diagramming Suite for Agent-Oriented Modelling Languages

Table 5

Atomic elements and diagram types.

Diagram type	Atomic elements to be displayed
(1) Static diagram types
Environment description	Entities represented by classes; relationships between the modelled entities
Environmental connectivity	Agents/MASs, internal and external resources, relationships across the MAS/environment interface
External organization structure chart	Organizational units in the real-life business
Architecture	Technology-independent large-scale structure
Agent society	Agents inside the MAS, how they associate with each other
Agent role	Links between the agents and the roles they play
Role dependency	Hierarchical structure of many roles
Agent internals	Constituent elements in an individual agent or role
Agent overview	High level view of an agent
Goal decomposition	Goals, subgoals
Ontology	The underpinning semantic structure
Plan	The (process) steps needed to effect a task and accomplish a goal
Capability	The ability or responsibility of an agent
Service	Functionality offered by the agent
Task decomposition	Tasks, subtasks
Deployment	Allocation of MAS elements to nodes of the run-time platform
UI design	TBD (the topic of proposed future research). (See brief discussion in Sections 5.7 and 6.5 on the relevant, non-AOSE UI literature)
(2) Dynamic diagram types
Agent goal-based use case	Functionality offered by the MAS
Use case map	Threads across many agents to realize a use case
Conversation	Dynamic interaction details
Protocol	Rules associated with interactions
Workflow	Large-scale processes relating to problem solving (in the real world)
Agent state	Attribute values determining the current state of an agent
Task specification	Definitions of tasks needed to accomplish a specific goal
Task state	The current state of a task, in terms of how far through the task enactment