Domain engineering to ensure flexibility on interaction laws of multi-agent systems

Law enforcement approaches have been proposed to promote dependability in open multi-agent systems. Interaction laws are defined and then enforced to promote predictability. As new software demands and requirements appear, the system and its interaction laws must evolve to support those changes. The purpose of domain engineering is to produce a set of reusable assets for a family of systems, which are then used to build concrete members of the family. Flexibility is the ease with which a system or component can be modified for use in applications other than those for which it was originally designed. In this paper, we discuss how the MLaw infrastructure was designed to support interaction law evolution providing support to produce a set of reusable laws for a family of systems. As an example, we have implemented two customizable applications in the area of electronic negotiation expressed as an open system environment.

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