An Aspect-based Multi-Agent System

We present how we used Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) to ease the development of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Our study focuses on the Aalaadin MAS model. We make use of AOP at both the conceptual level of Aalaadin and the implementation level. On the conceptual level, we introduced in Aalaadin AOP concepts. It results in unifying the group concept of Aalaadin with the aspect concept. This unification relies on reflection to allow the definition of groups with intrusive processing. On the implementation level, we used AOP to ease the implementation of a MAS infrastructure. It’s worth noting that the aspects we identified are not specific to the Aalaadin model. Indeed, aspects such as agent message building, messaging strategy or agent lookup are applicable in a variety of MAS.