A Model Driven Development of Platform-Neutral Agents

The automatic transformation of software agent designs into implementations for different agent platforms is currently a key issue in the MAS development process. Recently several approaches have been proposed using model driven development concepts to specify generic agent metamodels and/or define a set of transformation rules from the design phase for different agent implementation platforms. Although for some systems this is acceptable, in the context of Ambient Intelligence, this could be a serious limitation because of the variety of devices involved in these systems ranging from desktop computers to lightweight devices. In this paper we propose to transform PIM4Agents, a generic agent metamodel used at the design phase, into Malaca, an agent specific platform-neutral metamodel for agents. With only one set of transformations it is possible to generate a partial implementation in Malaca, which can be deployed in any kind of device and can interact with any FIPA compliant agent platform.

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