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This document is a tutorial that will introduce you to Brahms and agent-oriented modeling. Brahms has matured in recent years to a system usable to model complex work practice scenarios. This tutorial will present the main aspects of the language and the various modeling constructs available. As an agent language, Brahms requires a different way of thinking than object-oriented and procedural languages. In many books on object-oriented and procedural languages the Atm (automatic teller machine) scenario is used to explain the language.

The Atm example is a perfect starting point also for learning Brahms, because it showcases many of Brahms modeling constructs and also shows how Brahms differs from object-oriented or procedural languages. The discussion of a Brahms implementation of the Atm scenario therefore will form the core of this tutorial. You will be asked to complete exercises that consist in writing pieces of Brahms code to model increasingly complex aspects of the scenario. You will also be given working examples and pieces of code with which to compare your answers.

This tutorial, however, does not replace the Brahms Language Specification document (available here), that fully definines the modeling capabilities of Brahms and the formal syntax and related semantics of all the modeling concepts. While this tutorial is self-contained and does also cover elements of syntax and semantics, it is only an introduction to Brahms. It teaches by example how to use the language concepts, so that by the end of this tutorial you will be able to build simple to reasonably complex Brahms models. For a deeper mastering of the language, however, this document should be used in coordination with the Brahms Language Specification document.