Use of Agents for Resolving Feature Interactions

A Feature Interaction (FI) occurs when services (or features) behave incorrectly once they are used together. In this paper, we show how FIs can be resolved by using agents. An interest of our approach is that, instead of modifying directly the interacting services, we use a static or mobile agent which avoids the interaction by "forcing" the services to behave in a desirable way. We have determined a reduced set of generic operations that must be implemented and available to every agent; the possibility to execute these operations guarantees the possibility to resolve interactions using our approach.