Developing and Evolving a Multi-agent System Product Line: An Exploratory Study

Software Product Line (SPL) approaches motivate the development and implementation of a flexible and adaptable architecture to enable software reuse in organizations. The SPL architecture addresses a set of common and variable features of a family of products. Based on this architecture, products can be derived in a systematic way. A multi-agent system product line (MAS-PL) defines a SPL architecture, whose design and implementation is accomplished using software agents to address its common and variable features. This paper presents the evolutionary development of a MAS-PL from an existing web-based system. The MAS-PL architecture developed is composed of: (i) the core architecture represented by the web-based system that addresses the main mandatory features; and (ii) a set of software agents that extends the core architecture to introduce in the web system new optional and alternative autonomous behavior features. We report several lessons learned from this exploratory study of definition of a MAS-PL.

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