Taming Heterogeneous Agent Architectures with Aspects

The recent advances in network-based software applications and the advent of ubiquitous computing are pushing us inevitably towards a world of autonomous software architectures. This trend has spurred the revitalization of agent technology as a complement to the object paradigm for a variety of modern application domains, including e-commerce, software development environments, and personal assistants. There is explicit evidence to believe that the penetration of software agents is also high for systems used in military and government contexts [2, 8]. Agents, like objects, provide services to their clients, but are recognizably different from objects as seen from an architectural point of view [3, 5, 8]. Unlike objects, an agent is an autonomous entity that takes the initiative to achieve system goals and represent software users [2, 3]. As a result, architects of software agents are faced with basic concerns, such as the agent services that are made available to the clients, and a number of additional concerns on top of the basic concerns. The internal architecture of a single agent encompasses multiple properties, including autonomy, interaction, adaptation, collaboration, learning, and mobility. Hence architects of agent-based systems are also concerned with issues such as making an agent interact appropriately, handling the agent’s adaptive behavior, structuring the agent’s autonomous behavior, designing the agent roles and protocols for inter-agent collaboration purposes, and incorporating learning mechanisms into the agent’s structure in a modular manner.