A new approach to the BDI agent-based modeling

Abstract

Intelligent agents have been regarded as a new notion to build complex software systems. In this paper, we propose an agent-based software development process based on Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent model as a new software development process. The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model has been used as a fundamental ingredient to the new agent-based modeling method. In our agent system proposed here, each agent is made flesh by assigning its own belief, desire and intention. Here we have shown a seamless software development modeling technique consistently based on the BDI model. Even though there are many valuable arguments to define agents beside the BDI model, we currently use the BDI model only to simplify the agent modeling because we try to develop a more realistic agent-based modeling technique. We will extend this work to support other key concepts in agent computing.Here we propose a new approach comparing it with our previous approach to support the BDI agent-based modeling techniques. The previous approach finds intentions, desires and beliefs from two different kinds of use cases - external use cases and internal use cases - and supporting tools. The new approach finds in sequence desires, intentions and beliefs by using not only different kinds of use cases, sequence diagram, activity diagrams, and dataflow diagrams. To prove the usability of our software development process, we also provide a case study to clarify the description of our BDI agent software development process. This paper also introduces a brief structure of a CASE tool that we are currently developing to support the BDI agent software development process.