GAMA: towards architecture-centric software engineering of mobile agent systems
Selma Azaiez · 2004
Mobile agents form one of the most promising approach to face the problems encountered in the distributed systems. However, the use of this approach is still difficult. This is due to problems related to the software engineering dimension (absence of consensus about mobile agent paradigm, absence of methods allowing the modelling and the design of mobile agent systems). In this paper, we propose to converge the field of software engineering and mobile agent's one. The software architecture centered approach is used to propose the design of GAMA. GAMA is a Generic Architecture for Mobile Agent applications. This architecture aims to help the mobile agents designers to structure their applications while respecting the concepts of the own existing standard: MASIF standard. From the generic architecture, the designer derives the concrete architecture describing the need of its system. This architecture is formalized with π-ADL, an Architecture Description Language based on k-calculus and supporting the description of dynamic software architectures. We validate this architecture by applying it to a case study consisting in the sending of a mobile agent to update a program on a remote host.