Extending UML Interaction Diagrams For Mobile Agents Including Agent Platforms

Abstract

One of powerful software paradigms for distributed systems is a mobile agent system. Since the usage of mobile agent systems is increased, a software development model to construct softwares efficiently for these systems is needed. Currently, UML is a widely used software development model. However, existing UML can not describe the necessary mobility of the mobile agent based software systems in explicit way. In this paper, the interaction diagrams of UML(sequence diagrams and communication diagrams) are extended and used to express the mobility of the mobile agents including the functions of platforms of mobile agent systems in three ways. For a case study, we applied the extended diagrams to a distributed file searching using mobile agents, and we confirmed these diagrams can describe the function and mobility of mobile agents very well.