Monitoring Multi-Agent Systems for deadlock detection based on UML models

There is an increasing demand for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in the software industry. In order to bring MAS to the main stream of commercial software development, the behavior of MAS must be monitored and verified against the risk of unwanted emergent behaviors including deadlocks. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for efficient monitoring of MAS to detect resource and communication deadlocks. In this methodology, we construct a behavioral model of a MAS under analysis and use it for deadlock detection. The behavioral models are in the form of UML 2.0 sequence diagrams which are built from the modeling artifacts of the Multi-agent Software Engineering (MaSE) methodology. To detect MAS deadlocks at runtime based on UML sequence diagrams, we adapt and refine existing resource and communication deadlock detection techniques to the context of MAS. A monitoring scenario example of our methodology is presented.