Publication
Making Multiagent System Designs Reusable: A Model-driven Approach
Stefan Warwas; Matthias Klusch
In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology. IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT-11), August 22-27, Lyon, France, IEEE Press, 2011.
Abstract
Software engineers usually approach complex
problems by separating them into sub-problems. In multiagent
systems, sub-problems are solved by autonomous agents that
build organizational structures. Each agent internally further
decomposes a problem by goal and plan hierarchies. The
underlying design of a system reflects an engineers experience
with approaching complex problems. It is desirable to reuse
patterns and structures that proved their practical use and
were validated (e.g. interaction protocols, goal hierarchies, behavior
templates, organizational structures, etc.). This improves
software quality and reduces development time and costs in
the long run. Model-driven software engineering enables the
separation of the platform independent design of the system
under consideration and the actual implementation for a
concrete execution platform. The gap between the different
levels of abstraction is closed by model transformations. In
this paper we propose a model-driven reverse engineering
approach for lifting the underlying design of implemented
multiagent systems to a platform independent level. For this
purpose we specify conceptual mappings from the platform to
our platform independent modeling language. The extracted
structures have to be refined (e.g. by using existing platform
independent artifacts) and can be re-used as blue print for
solving similar problems on similar execution platforms. We
evaluated our approach for the BDI agent platform Jadex and
a real-world scenario.