Affiliations: Innovative Informatics Group, School of Computing, IT and Engineering, University of East London, England | Information Systems Research Unit, Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium | Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Trento, Italy | Information Management Research Unit, University of Namur, Belgium
Abstract: Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity for building open, distributed, and evolving information systems. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in the fields of software architecture and MAS during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at defining languages for designing and formalising secure agent architectures. This paper proposes a novel Architectural Description Language (ADL) for describing Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) secure MAS. We specify each element of our ADL using the Z specification language and we employ two example case studies: one to assist us in the description of the proposed language and help readers of the article to better understand the fundamentals of the language; and one to demonstrate its applicability.
