This paper illustrates an approach to combining the benefits of a multi-agent system architecture with the use of industry-standard modelling techniques using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Using a UML profile for ontology modelling, an ontology for travel booking services is presented and the automatic derivation of an object-oriented content language for this domain is described. This content language is then used to encode example messages for a simple travel booking scenario, and it is shown how this approach to agent messaging allows messages to be created and analysed using a convenient object-oriented application-specific application programmer interface.
Stephen Cranefield, Jin Pan, Martin K. Purvis