A multi-agent architectural pattern for wrapping off-the-shelf components

Abstract

The benefits of off-the-shelf component-based software development are essentially lower cost and shorter development time. Nevertheless, the integration of components is seldom trivial. Indeed, developers can face black boxes or products that are poorly documented and specified. Mismatches between components functionality and system requirements are then difficult to address. To deal with such issues, this paper proposes to use an architectural pattern for wrapping software components. To that extend, we develop a multi-agent system architecture - the wrapper - that offers an abstraction layer over the components. The architecture is in charge of the functional decomposition, coordination and delegation of the client requests to the components at disposal. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.