Agent behavior representation in INGENIAS

Nowadays, we have different agent oriented methodologies that enable developers to produce agent oriented designs. One of the recurrent problems of these methodologies is how to describe the behaviour of agents within a system. A developer needs primitives to express autonomy, proactivity, and social concerns of his agents, but there are problems in understanding what does these elements mean, beyond any natural language explanation. There is a clear need of semantic models understandable by average engineers. These models could help in foreseeing the impact of autonomy with respect system goals, or determining if, in an agent specification, a task will ever be scheduled for execution. This paper presents a proposal of semantic model for the visual modelling language used in INGENIAS, a project started in 2002 and considered the inheritor of MESSAGE/UML.