OBJETOS E AGENTES: UMA ABORDAGEM ORIENTADA A ASPECTOS / FROM OBJECTS TO AGENTS: AN ASPECT ORIENTED APPROACH

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2004

RESUMO

Software engineers of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are faced with different concerns (properties), such as autonomy, adaptation, interaction, collaboration, learning, and mobility. Many of these agent concerns cannot be modularized based only on object-oriented abstractions. MAS developers however have relied mostly on objectoriented design techniques and on object-oriented programming languages, such as Java. As the agent complexity increases, the agent concerns tend to spread across several system components at the architectural, design and implementation levels. It often leads to a poor separation of agent concerns in the software system, and in turn to the production of MASs that are difficult to maintain and reuse. This thesis presents an innovative aspect-oriented approach for the seamless integration of agents into object-oriented software engineering from the architectural stage to the implementation stage. Aspect is the abstraction used to modularize agent concerns that crosscut several system components. The proposed approach encourages the separate handling of agent properties, and provides a disciplined scheme for their composition. The approach is composed of an architectural method, a pattern language, and an assessment framework. The architectural method and the pattern language provide aspect-oriented solutions for modularizing the agent concerns at different stages of design and implementation. The purpose of the assessment framework is to support the evaluation of the reusability and maintainability of aspect-oriented solutions based on a metrics suite and a quality model. Experimental studies in different application domains have been conducted to assess the proposed approach based on qualitative and quantitative criteria. The use of the aspect-oriented solutions resulted in fewer lines of code, fewer design and implementation components, lower internal complexity of system components, and lower coupling.

ASSUNTO(S)

software agents agentes de software arquitetura de software sistemas multi-agentes multi-agent systems engenharia de software experimental software architecture empirical software engineering

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