Modeling Agent Systems with Distributed Transformation Units

Agent systems have become more and more important in computer science. They allow to implement complex distributed systems composed of communicating autonomous entities. Transformation units constitute a structuring principle for graph transformation systems which split up large sets of rules, but still graphs are transformed as a whole. Recently, distributed transformation units have been introduced as an extension of transformation units to distributed graphs and distributed graph transformation. In this paper it is illustrated how different features of agent systems can be smoothly modeled in a uniform way by distributed graph transformation systems. For this purpose an agent system case study with simple agents communicating via blackboards and message passing is presented.