A Secure Architectural Description Language for Agent Systems

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.

Citation:
Mouratidis, H. et al. (2005) ‘A Secure Architectural Description Language for Agent Systems’ Proceedings 4th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Utrecht - The Netherlands, pp 578-585.