A secure architectural description language for agent systems

Abstract

Multi-agent systems are now being considered a promising architectural approach for building Internet-based applications. One of the most critical and important aspects of software deployed on the web has always been the security of their architectures. However, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining languages for designing and formalizing agent architectures and more specifically secure ones. This paper identifies the foundations for an architectural description language (ADL) to specify secure multi-agent systems. We propose a set of system design primitives and conceptualize it with the Z specification language to capture a core architectural model to build secure MAS architectures. We apply it on an e-commerce example to illustrate our proposal.