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Tailoring Agent Platforms with Software Product Lines

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Multiagent System Technologies (MATES 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9433))

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Abstract

Agent platforms have been conceived traditionally as middleware, helping to deal with various application challenges like agent programming models, remote messaging, and coordination protocols. A middleware is typically a bundle of functionalities necessary to execute multi-agent applications. In contrast to this traditional view, nowadays different use cases also for selected agent concepts have emerged requiring also different kinds of functionalities. Examples include a platform for conducting multi-agent simulations, intelligent agent behavior models for controlling non-player characters (NPCs) in games and a lightweight version suited for mobile devices. A one-size-fits-all software bundle often does not sufficiently match these requirements, because customers and developers want solutions specifically tailored to their needs, i.e. a small but focused solution is frequently preferred over bloated software with extraneous functionality. Software product lines are an approach suitable for creating a series of similar products from a common code base. In this paper we will show how software product line modeling and technology can help creating tailor-made products from multi-agent platforms. Concretely, the Jadex platform will be analyzed and a feature model as well as an implementation path will be presented.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://code.google.com/p/jadex-agentkeeper/

  2. 2.

    http://jmonkeyengine.org/

  3. 3.

    The feature model has been edited with the FeatureIDE eclipse plugin: http://wwwiti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/iti_db/research/featureide/.

  4. 4.

    It has to be noted that the crosscutting feature means that the implementation of a feature touches multiple other features while the optional feature problem refers to the usage of another optional feature which might not be present. The latter problem seems to occur much more often than the former. Even typical crosscutting aspects like monitoring and security only lead to the optional feature problem, because they often can be implemented in one feature but need to be used from many places.

  5. 5.

    http://www.pure-systems.com/pure_variants.49.0.html

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Systems Group, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Lars Braubach, Alexander Pokahr, Julian Kalinowski & Kai Jander

Authors
  1. Lars Braubach
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  2. Alexander Pokahr
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  3. Julian Kalinowski
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  4. Kai Jander
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Pokahr .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität Clausthal, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Jörg P. Müller

  2. Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Wolf Ketter

  3. Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Gal Kaminka

  4. Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany

    Gerd Wagner

  5. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Nils Bulling

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Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Kalinowski, J., Jander, K. (2015). Tailoring Agent Platforms with Software Product Lines . In: Müller, J., Ketter, W., Kaminka, G., Wagner, G., Bulling, N. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies . MATES 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9433. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27343-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27343-3_1

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