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HONS 08/07

Developing Multi Agent Systems using the Model Driven Architecture and Aspects

Toby Cox
Department of Computer Science
University of Canterbury

Abstract

Multi Agent Systems (MAS) comprise of a collection of autonomous and interacting agents that adapt to their environment. The agents within a MAS exhibit many of the same behaviours in the form of cross-cutting concerns. Aspects are a technology that can be used to represent cross-cutting concerns by weaving them through a system at specific points. In this paper a development process based on the Model Driven Architecture is proposed, that is used to perform a series of transformations from a platform independent to a MAS whose agency concerns are represented as aspects. The advantage of the proposed process is that a MAS containing many different types of agent can be easily modelled and transformed. Only the functional requirements of the MAS need be implemented after generation. The proposed process has been applied in small to medium MAS development scenarios with encouraging results obtained.