Abstract

Multi-agent systems are emerging as a potential solution to the problem of constructing flexible network-based software. A characteristic of such systems is that wholesystem behaviour patterns emerge from the combination of many details in many agents, in sometimes intricate ways. Understanding the big picture by composing the details is often difficult and designing the details to achieve some desired whole-system behaviour pattern can easily become a cut-and-try exercise. To help solve these problems, we offer use case maps (UCMs) to provide a first-class representation of whole-system behaviour patterns, at a level above details. To illustrate the approach, we apply it to a classical distributed system problem of a kind that agent systems must be capable of solving, namely feature interaction in telephony.

-- Jean Francois Roy - 18 Oct 2005

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