Engineering degrees of agency
Steven P. Fonseca · 2006
The Mission Control Technologies Project at NASA Ames Research Center is developing component-based middleware with multi-agent like characteristics that must satisfy many competing quality attributes. This paper makes the observation that, while a multi-agent system solution is a relevant source of architecture and design artifacts, it is not possible to achieve the desired system quality attributes with a purely MAS implementation. MAS frameworks offer agents as the primary unit of decomposition and encapsulation. The degree of agency is also selected by framework developers - indicating that the agent abstraction is not considered a point of framework variability. We introduce the notion of engineering degrees of agency into an application framework by designing points of variability (hooks) that enable a programmer to tune the degree of agency used through customizations of the agent abstraction.