Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a new software engineering
paradigm that arose to apply best practice in the development of complex
Multi-Agent Systems
A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Jang, I.; Arvin, F.; Lanzon, A.,A Decentralized Cluster Formation Containment Framework fo ...
(MAS) by focusing on the use of agents, and organizations (communities) of agents as the main abstractions. The field of
Software Product Line Software product lines (SPLs), or software product line development, refers to software engineering methods, tools and techniques for creating a collection of similar software systems from a shared set of software assets using a common means of pro ...
s (SPL) covers all the
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
development lifecycle necessary to develop a family of products where the derivation of concrete products is made systematically and rapidly.
Commentary
With the advent of biologically inspired, pervasive, and
autonomic computing
Autonomic computing (AC) is distributed computing resources with self-managing characteristics, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. Initiated by IBM in 2001, this initiative ultimately aime ...
, the advantages of, and necessity of, agent-based technologies and MASs has become obvious. Unfortunately, current AOSE methodologies are dedicated to developing single MASs. Clearly, many MASs will make use of significantly the
same techniques, adaptations, and approaches. The field is thus ripe for exploiting the benefits of SPL: reduced costs, improved time-to-market, etc. and enhancing agent technology in such a way that it is more industrially applicable.
Multiagent Systems Product Lines (MAS-PL) is a research field devoted to combining the two approaches: applying the SPL philosophy for building a MAS. This will afford all of the advantages of SPLs and make MAS development more practical.
References
* Michael Winikoff and Lin Padgham. ''Agent Oriented Software Engineering''. Chapter 15 (pages 695-757) In G. Weiss (Ed.)
Multiagent Systems 2nd Edition. MIT Press. (a recent survey of the field)
* Site of the MaCMAS methodology which is applying MAS-PL. http://www.macmas.org
* MAS Product Lines site: https://web.archive.org/web/20140518122645/http://mas-productlines.org/
* Joaquin Peña, Michael G. Hinchey, and Antonio Ruiz-Cortés. Multiagent system product lines: Challenges and benefits. Communications of the ACM, December 2006, volume 49, issue number 12.
*
* Joaquin Peña, Michael G. Hinchey, Antonio Ruiz-Cortés, and Pablo Trinidad. Building the Core Architecture of a NASA Multiagent System Product Line. In 7th International Workshop on Agent Oriented Software Engineering 2006, page to be published, Hakodate, Japan, May 2006. LNCS. https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-540-70945-9_13
* Joaquin Peña, Michael G. Hinchey, Manuel Resinas, Roy Sterritt, James L. Rash. Managing the Evolution of an Enterprise Architecture using a MAS-Product-Line Approach. 5th Int. Workshop on System/Software Architectures (IWSSA’06). Nevada, USA. 2006
* Soe-Tsyr Yuan. MAS Building Environments with Product-Line-Architecture Awareness.
and
Robyn Lutz have several publications in this field.
MAS-PL -- Current research I
December 2006.
Software project management
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