Agents in object-oriented software engineering

  • Authors:

  • Alessandro F. Garcia;Carlos J. P. de Lucena;Donald D. Cowan

  • Affiliations:

  • Software Engineering Laboratory, SoC+Agents/TecComm Group, Computer Science Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro—PUC-Rio, Rua Marquês de São Vicent ...;Software Engineering Laboratory, SoC+Agents/TecComm Group, Computer Science Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro—PUC-Rio, Rua Marquês de São Vicent ...;Computer Systems Group, School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience - Research Articles
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Software engineers of multi-agent systems (MASs) are faced with different concerns such as autonomy, adaptation, interaction, collaboration, learning, and mobility, which are essentially different from classical concerns addressed in object-oriented software engineering. MAS developers, however, have relied mostly on object-oriented design techniques and programming languages, such as Java. This often leads to a poor separation of MAS concerns and in turn to the production of MASs that are difficult to maintain and reuse. This paper discusses software engineering approaches for MASs, and presents a new method for integrating agents into object-oriented software engineering from an early stage of design. The proposed approach encourages the separate handling of MAS concerns, and provides a disciplined scheme for their composition. Our proposal explores the benefits of aspect-oriented software development for the incorporation of agents into object-oriented systems. We also illustrate our aspect-oriented approach through the Portalware multi-agent system, a Web-based environment for the development of e-commerce portals. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.