Agent technology: a new frontier for the development of application frameworks?

Agent technology has recently been proposed as an enabling technology to model and design heterogeneous distributed systems. Unfortunately, most of the research and development of software agents is currently based on proprietary design architectures. This has two main drawbacks: new agent systems are invented from scratch each time and distributed agents are usually not able to interoperate. The goal of this chapter is to show that the effectiveness of agent technology concepts may be better exploited, if the development process is guided by a consolidated reuse methodology, and to show how agent technology can enhance the flexibility and adaptability of Object Oriented systems and simplify the development of reusable application frameworks for the distributed systems domain. The main contribution of the chapter is the description of the RETSINA agent model and the RETSINA application framework for the development of interoperable heterogeneous agents. The framework has been evaluated through the development of a variety of applications in the information gathering domain.