A UML-Based Conversion Tool for Monitoring and Testing Multi-agent Systems

The increasing demand for multi-agent systems (MAS) in the software industry has led to development of several agent oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies. The autonomous agents´ interaction in a dynamic software environment can potentially lead to runtime behavioral failures such as deadlock. Therefore, the MAS environment should be tested and monitored against the unwanted emergent behaviors. The AOSE methodologies usually do not cover monitoring and testing. On the other hand model-based software development practices such as the Unified Modeling Languages (UML) are commonly used in practice and are equipped with a rich set of model based testing and monitoring tools. In this paper, we propose a conversion tool to help MAS engineers use UML-based monitoring and testing tools to test and monitor MAS design and analysis artifacts created by multi-agent software engineering (MaSE) as one of the most powerful and famous AOSE methodologies.