Designing social patterns using advanced separation of concerns

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to support separation and modularization of crosscutting concerns in multi-agent systems (MAS). Crosscutting concerns are properties that do not align well with the decomposition criteria of the chosen approach and, therefore, cannot be modularized. Aspect-Oriented Software Development offers mechanisms to encapsulate such properties in separate modules, the aspects. Aspects are used as abstractions to capture social patterns concerns that cut across functional modules in MAS. To achieve this, we propose a technique to describe social patterns in an aspect-oriented context and a systematic way for using them in MAS design. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.