A-ADL: An architecture description language for multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) generally exhibit complicated dynamic structure and behavior characteristics. If traditional architecture description languages (ADLs) are applied, semantic gap and expression problems are difficult to overcome. An agent-based architecture description language A-ADL is proposed in this paper, which takes computation/connector agent as architectural elements instead of component/connector in traditional ADL. By introducing architectural primitives, rule-based agent description and multi-view mechanism, it can be effectively used to model complicated dynamic architectures and overcome semantic gap mentioned above. This paper also describes dynamic architecture modeling method of A-ADL with an example, and justifies the suitability of A-ADL for MAS by comparing A-ADL with several other traditional ADLs.