Aspects in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: Lessons Learned

Several concerns in the development of multi-agent systems (MASs) cannot be represented in a modular fashion. In general, they inherently affect several system modules and cannot be explicitly captured based on existing software engineering abstractions. These crosscutting concerns encompass internal agent properties and systemic properties, such as learning, code mobility, error handling, and context-awareness. In this context, it is important to systematically verify whether emerging development paradigms support improved modularization of the crosscutting concerns relative to MASs. This paper reports some lessons learned based on our experience in using aspect-oriented techniques and methods to address these problems. In the light of these lessons, related work and a set of future research directions are also discussed.