Documenting and Modeling Multi-agent Systems Product Lines

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

Software Product Line (SPL) approaches motivate the development and implementation of a flexible and adaptable architecture to enable software reuse in organizations. The SPL architecture addresses a set of common and variable features of a family of products. Based on this architecture, products can be derived in a systematic way. A multi-agent system product line (MAS-PL) defines an SPL architecture that is modularized, also using software agents to model, design and implement its common and variable features. This paper presents the development of an MAS-PL for the web domain, describing its architecture, the agents that compose the system and details of the object-oriented implementation and design. This MAS-PL consists of the evolutionary development of the ExpertCommittee web-based system. Furthermore, this paper reports some lessons learned from this exploratory study of definition of a MAS-PL.

Journal of Systems and Software, 2009

Agent-oriented software engineering and software product lines are two promising software engineering techniques. Recent research work has been exploring their integration, namely multi-agent systems product lines (MAS-PLs), to promote reuse and variability management in the context of complex software systems. However, current product derivation approaches do not provide specific mechanisms to deal with MAS-PLs. This is essential because they typically encompass several concerns (e.g., trust, coordination, transaction, state persistence) that are constructed on the basis of heterogeneous technologies (e.g., object-oriented frameworks and platforms). In this paper, we propose the use of multi-level models to support the configuration knowledge specification and automatic product derivation of MAS-PLs. Our approach provides an agent-specific architecture model that uses abstractions and instantiation rules that are relevant to this application domain. In order to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have implemented it as an extension of an existing product derivation tool, called GenArch. The approach has also been evaluated through the automatic instantiation of two MAS-PLs, demonstrating its potential and benefits to product derivation and configuration knowledge specification.► We propose the use of multi-level models to support the product derivation of MAS-PLs. ► Our model-driven approach supports automatic and correct product derivation. ► The models reduce the complexity and verbosity of the configuration knowledge.

2006

On the one hand, the Software Product Lines (SPL) field is devoted to build a core architecture for a family of products from which concrete products can be derived rapidly by means of reuse. On the other hand, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a software engineering paradigms dedicated to build software applications composed of organizations of agents. Bringing AOSE to the industrial world may prettily benefit from SPL advantages. Using SPL philosophy, a company will be able to define a core MAS from which concrete products will be derived for each customer. This can reduce time-to-market, costs, etcetera. In this paper, we expose the similarities between AOSE and SPL concluding the viability of future research in Multi-Agent Systems Product Lines (MAS-PL).

Multi-agent Systems (MASs) are often being applied in a wide range of industrial applications, showing the effectiveness of the agent abstraction to develop open, highly interac- tive, autonomous and context-aware systems. MASs have been combined with Service-oriented Architectures (SOAs) in order to provide customization and flexibility in these systems. This com- bination calls for new approaches that support personalized user services through autonomous and pro-active components in dynamic environments. Existing approaches fail to provide reusable multi-agent service components as well as suitable representations and processes that support au- tomated software generation based on common and variable features within a domain. In this paper we present a domain engineering process-oriented approach to build service-oriented user agents using the Software Product Line (SPL) engineering paradigm. The approach comprises activities and models to support the development of service-orient...

Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2009

A multi-agent system product line (MAS-PL) defines an architecture whose design and implementation is accomplished using software agents to address its common and variable features. MAS-PL promotes the large-scale reuse of common and variable agency features across multiple MAS applications. The development of MAS-PLs can be achieved through MAS-specific platforms and implementation techniques, such as conditional compilation and aspect-oriented programming (AOP). However, there is not much evidence on how these techniques provide better modularity, allowing the conception of stable MAS-PL designs. This paper presents a quantitative study on the design modularity and stability of an evolving MAS-PL. The MAS-PL was built following the reactive product line adoption approach. The product line was developed and evolved based on several versions of a conference management webbased system, named Expert Committee (EC). Our evaluation is made through a series of change scenarios related to new agency features, which are agent characteristics that enhance the system with autonomous behavior. The quantitative study consists of a systematic comparison between two different versions of the EC MAS-PL based on a MAS-specific platform, called JADE. One version was implemented with object-oriented and conditional compilation techniques. The other one relied on AOP. Our analysis was driven by well-known modularity and change impact metrics.

2009

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly being exploited to support autonomous recommendation of products and information to contemporary application users. Multi-agent system product lines (MAS-PL) promote large-scale reuse of common and variable agency features across multiple MAS applications. The development of MAS-PLs can be achieved through alternative MAS-specific frameworks (JADE and Jadex), and general-purpose implementation techniques, such as aspect-oriented programming (AOP). However, there is not much evidence on how these techniques provide better modularity, allowing the conception of stable MAS-PL designs. This paper reports an empirical study that assesses the modularity of a MAS-PL through a systematic analysis of its releases. The study consists of a comparison among three distinct versions of this MAS-PL, each one implemented with a different technique: (i) Jadex platform and configuration files; (ii) JADE platform and configuration files; and (iii) JADE platform enriched with AOP mechanisms. Our analysis was driven by fundamental modularity attributes.

cs.uwaterloo.ca

Multi-agent Systems (MASs) are often being applied in a wide range of industrial applications, showing the effectiveness of the agent abstraction to develop open, highly interactive, autonomous and context-aware systems. MASs have been combined with Service-oriented Architectures (SOAs) in order to provide customization and flexibility in these systems. This combination calls for new approaches that support personalized user services through autonomous and pro-active components in dynamic environments. Existing approaches fail to provide reusable multi-agent service components as well as suitable representations and processes that support automated software generation based on common and variable features within a domain. In this paper we present a domain engineering process-oriented approach to build service-oriented user agents using the Software Product Line (SPL) engineering paradigm. The approach comprises activities and models to support the development of service-oriented customized agents that automate user tasks based on service orchestration involving multiple agents in open environments, and takes advantage of the synergy of SOA, MAS and SPL. The domain-based process involves extended domain analysis with goals and variability, domain design with the specification of agent services and plans, and domain implementation.

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2001

To gain wider acceptance for the use of agents in industry, it is a necessity to relate it to the nearest antecedent technology (object-oriented software development) and to introduce appropriate artifacts to support the development environment throughout the full system life cycle. We address both of these requirements by presenting AGENT UML, the Agent UML (Unified Modeling Language) — a set of UML idioms and extensions. This paper provides an AGENT UML representation of the internal behavior of an agent; it then relates this internal description to the external behavior of the agent by using and extending UML class diagrams and by describing agent interaction protocols in a new way. Our claim is that by extending the de-facto standard representation for object-oriented modeling to agents, the learning curve for object-oriented developers to adopt aspects of agent-based programming becomes much less steep. Thus, agent-oriented programming as a whole will become more amenable to ma...

Tropos is a framework which offers an approach to guide the development of multi-agent systems (MAS). It relies on the i* notation to describe both requirements and architectural design. However, the use of i* as an architectural description language (ADL) is not suitable, since it presents some limitations to capture all the information required for designing MAS architectures. Recognizing that the Unified Modeling Language 2.0 (UML) supports software architectural description, in this work we present an extension to the UML metamodel to capture the features of agency to support MAS modeling at the architectural level. In doing so, we define a notation to model MAS architectures. Furthermore, we provide a set of heuristics to describe MAS using our UML-based notation derived from an architectural description using i*. We illustrate our approach by modeling a Conference Management System.

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems, 2018

Multiagent systems (MAS) can vary in several ways: by involving different agents, distinct interaction patterns, various forms of agent organizations and environments. One promising approach to consider this variability in MAS is the use of the concept of Multiagent System-Product Line (MAS-PL). The idea is to implement a family of MAS that belong to the same domain, instead of a single MAS. However, there is still a lack of methodological support to develop MAS-PL. This paper tackles this problem with a rigorous respect of software product line principals. We propose an automated approach, the Meduse for MAS-PL, to generate families of MAS-PL methods that offer software product line best practices integrated with existing MAS development approaches to support MAS-PL development. To illustrate, we present a case study involving a family of MAS-PL methods that extends Gaia and Tropos.