Bibliography

Agent Technologies for Plug-in System Architecture Design

Lawrence Cabac , Michael Duvigneau, Daniel Moldt, and Heiko Rölke.
Agent technologies for plug-in system architecture design.
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Agent-oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), Utrecht, Netherlands, 2005.

In this work we present the basic concepts for a dynamic plug-in-based software architecture using concepts from the Petri net-based MAS framework Mulan. By transferring the concepts of agent-orientation to a plug-in-based architecture we are able to design our application and the plug-in-based system on an abstract level. Moreover, general problems that evolve from a highly dynamic and configurable architecture have been solved by basing the conceptual design on multi-agent principles. In this paper we discuss the general problems that are inherent to extensible systems and the benefits that the multi-agent view can provide to solve these problems. In addition to the conceptual modeling of such architectures, we provide a practical example where the concept has been successfully applied in the development of the latest release of Renew (Version 2 of the multiformalism Petri net IDE). The overall monolithic architecture has been exchanged with a system that is divided into a plug-in management system and plug-ins that provide functionality. Through the introduction of the multi-agent concepts, the new architecture is now - at runtime - dynamically extensible by registering plug-ins with the management system. The introduced concepts are applicable for any kind of architecture but most suitable for applications with dynamic structure.

BibTeX

@InProceedings{Cabac+05d,
  author =   {Cabac, Lawrence and Duvigneau, Michael and Moldt, Daniel and R{\"o}lke, Heiko},
  title =   {Agent Technologies for Plug-in System Architecture Design},
  booktitle =   {Proceedings of the Workshop on Agent-oriented Software Engineering (AOSE)},
  year =  2005,
  address =  {Utrecht, Netherlands},
  abstract =  { In this work we present the basic concepts for a
                  dynamic plug-in-based software architecture using
                  concepts from the Petri net-based MAS framework
                  Mulan. By transferring the concepts of
                  agent-orientation to a plug-in-based architecture we
                  are able to design our application and the
                  plug-in-based system on an abstract level. Moreover,
                  general problems that evolve from a highly dynamic
                  and configurable architecture have been solved by
                  basing the conceptual design on multi-agent
                  principles. In this paper we discuss the general
                  problems that are inherent to extensible systems and
                  the benefits that the multi-agent view can provide
                  to solve these problems. In addition to the
                  conceptual modeling of such architectures, we
                  provide a practical example where the concept has
                  been successfully applied in the development of the
                  latest release of Renew (Version 2 of the
                  multiformalism Petri net IDE). The overall
                  monolithic architecture has been exchanged with a
                  system that is divided into a plug-in management
                  system and plug-ins that provide
                  functionality. Through the introduction of the
                  multi-agent concepts, the new architecture is now -
                  at runtime - dynamically extensible by registering
                  plug-ins with the management system. The introduced
                  concepts are applicable for any kind of architecture
                  but most suitable for applications with dynamic
                  structure.},
  annotate = {Filename: masplugin (revision: submitted-aose05)}
}