Towards a MAS Product Line Engineering Approach

Abstract

It is our claim that the adoption of software engineering reuse techniques can leverage MAS development, mostly when we consider similar applications belonging to the same domain. MAS-Product Line (MAS-PL) raises as an interesting approach that uses Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) techniques and AOSE to manage the commonalities (similarities) and variabilities (differences) of such MAS applications. Although MAS present specific characteristics that could be considered when describing the system variability, existing work on MAS-PL is devoted to deal with MAS variability considering only domain-specific issues. Moreover, the adoption of variability models such as feature models should be considered for describing both Generic and Specific MAS variability. We propose a MAS-PL approach to address the aforementioned issues by representing Generic MAS variability according to MAS concepts such as agents, environment, interaction and organization, and Specific MAS variability according to a specific application domain. We evaluate the approach by deriving a family of agents that perform jobs in the Multi-Agent Contest environment.