A component and aspect-based architecture for rapid software agent development

Abstract

Current agent architectures provided by MAS platforms impose some limitation that affect the development of the functionality of software agents from scratch, placing little emphasis on (re)configuration and (re)use. This paper presents a software agent architecture development approach using a component and aspect-based architecture that promotes building agents from reusable software components and the configuration of some software agents. The basis of our architecture is the use of component-based and aspect-based software development concepts to separate agent functionality into independent entities increasing extensibility, maintainability and adaptability of the agent to new environments and demands. The architecture simplifies the software agent development process, which can be reduced to the description of the agents constituent components and supported agent interaction protocols using XML documents. In addition, the extensibility provided by the component orientation enables to extend and reconfigure the internal agent architecture to accomplish additional agent capabilities such as planning. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.