A Unified Specification Format for Interlevel Relations between Agent Models in Multiple Abstraction Dimensions

Multi-agent systems for a certain application area can be modeled at multiple levels of abstraction. Interlevel relations are a means to relate models from different abstraction levels. Three dimensions of abstraction often occurring are the process abstraction, temporal abstraction, and agent cluster abstraction dimension. In this paper a unifying formalization is presented that can be used as a framework to specify interlevel relations for any of such dimensions. The approach is illustrated by showing how a variety of different types of abstraction relations between multi-agent system models can be formally specified in a unified manner. © 2013 World Scientific Publishing Company.