mWater prototype #3 analysis and design

Abstract

In themWater case study prototype #3 it has been used Magentix2 [1, 24, 3, 22, 4, 17] (for more details on Magentix2 see WP7 Deliverables) as the MAS platform for supporting the execution of the MAS system. The platform follows the FIPA standards [14] offering a set of useful mechanisms for the agents to communicate and also tools to allow programming agents in a high level language based on the BDI model. Magentix2 is an open system which facilitates the interaction between heterogeneous agents through FIPA-ACL messages. Also complex interactions can be carried out in a flexible an open way as conversations. The platform offers special structures to allow to use such conversations by considering a set of issues: In each conversation there are always two roles involved: Initiator and Participant. The first is the one who initiates the conversation, and the rest of agents play the Participant role. The conversation can be seen as a direct graph where nodes represent the actions to perform in each step of the conversation and arcs represent the transition between such states. Those steps allow to perform some actions and they can be of different kinds, for example: Begin, Final, Wait, Send, Receive, Action, etc. Conversations have a unique identifier that allows to manage them individually. 1