Agent role locking (ARL): Theory for agent oriented software engineering

Software engineering development is crucial for industrial and commercial applications as these systems are required to operate in increasingly complex, distributed, open, dynamic, unpredictable, and inherently highly interactive environments. This work is being motivated by the need to engineer complex systems with autonomous entities, to manage their inherent complexity during analysis, design and implementation, towards the development of systems with adaptation abilities. The paper introduces the Agent Role Locking (ARL) theory that provides a new conceptualization of the relation between agents, roles and objects. ARL calls on modification of AUML agent class diagram by introducing role classes in conjunction to agent classes and preserves the distinguishing characteristics between agent and object entities.