Object-oriented high level petri nets as a formal language for modelling and design multi-agent systems

Abstract

Agent oriented systems are often complex systems and there is a need for developing modelling techniques that permit to manage such complex systems and to allow the process of system design to be sufficiently reliable and extensible. In this paper we present a new class of Petri nets called Object Oriented High Level Petri Nets (OOHLPN) as a unified language used for modelling and design of multi-agent systems (MAS). The design of MAS is based on three fundamental perspectives: the functional, the interactional, and the organizational perspective. In order to allow the modelling and design of MAS from theses perspectives the proposed formalism has several properties: (a) it allow a connection with rule-based systems in order to incorporate the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model, which is used to describe the mental states of agents, (b) it allows an asynchronous message passing between objects in order to describe the interactional perspective of MAS, (c) it allow the description of distributed and concurrent systems of objects in order to model the organizational perspective of MAS, and (d) it uses the inheritance and polymorphism concepts in order to allow an efficient method of MAS design. An example of using OOHLPN for MAS modelling is provided. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.