Multi-Agent Based Framework for Large Scale Visual Program Reuse
Mika Karaila, Ari Kalevi Leppäniemi · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2006
Today’s application engineers are committed to the reuse of programs for performance and economic reasons. Moreover, they increasingly have to complement application programs with less information and in shorter time. The reuse of already implemented programs is therefore fundamental. We have implemented a process automation specific framework that supports reuse of our domain specific visual language. The visual Function Block Language is used for power plant and paper machine controls.The reuse framework discussed in this paper relies in identification and usage of templates, which are used for generating actual application software instances.The framework automates data mining with software agents collecting metadata. The metadata is send ahead to the receiver agent that stores the data into the central database. Another agent analyzes stored data and performs template matching. Again another agent is called for more detailed template match comparison. Although the database is centralized, the agents can be distributed and run in intranet. The framework implementation is pure java based and runs on JADE-FIPA agent platform