Mobility as an Aspect : The AspectM Framework

Software engineers of multi-agent systems (MASs) are faced with the design and implementation of the mobility concern in addition to the agents’ basic functionalities and other agent-related concerns. As the agents’ complexity increases, the mobility concern cannot be modularized based only on object-oriented abstractions. The mobility concern tends to spread across several system classes and methods, which in turn leads to the production of MASs that are difficult to maintain and reuse. MAS developers, however, have mostly relied on object-oriented frameworks and on object-oriented programming languages, such as Java. This paper presents an aspect-oriented framework, called the AspectM framework, that supports improved modularization of the mobility concern and a flexible integration with multiple mobility platforms. The use of our framework minimizes code replication, and increases the reusability and maintainability of the mobility concern and other agent concerns.