Separation of concerns in open multi-agent systems: an architectural approach
Alejandro Javier García · 2004
Agent architectures of open multi-agent systems have to cope with a number of agent properties (concerns), such as adaptation, learning, and mobility. These systems require an architectural approach that supports flexible composition of agent properties and construction of heterogeneous agent architectures. In this context, separation of concerns is at the core of the development of agent architectures for open systems. Existing approaches do not provide appropriate support for modularization of the agent properties at the architectural stage. The architectural agent design with these approaches usually increases, rather than decreases, the system complexity and, consequently, it makes more difficult the task of building reusable and maintainable multi-agent systems. This paper presents an aspect-oriented agent architecture that allows for a better separation of concerns, supporting the separate handling of agent properties throughout the software lifecycle. Moreover the aspect-oriented agent architecture encourages flexible composition of the agent properties, and facilitates the construction of heterogeneous agent architectures for open systems. An open development environment is assumed as a case study through the paper to show the applicability of our proposal.