Developing an Agent Systems Reference Architecture

Abstract : One reason for the slow adoption in industry of agent-oriented methodologies as a paradigm for developing systems is the lack of integration and general-purpose technologies. To this end, there is a need to define common patterns, relationships between components, and structural qualities of an agent system. A reference architecture for agent-based systems would suit this need. This work describes the methodology for constructing an agent systems reference architecture by combining reverse software engineering techniques and tools and a documentation methodology. The goal of the resulting reference architecture is to identify common patterns and relationships between concepts present in agent systems to aid in describing and designing new agent systems. Our approach is the application of a modified 4+1 View Model to existing agent framework implementations creating five architectural views. We apply this process to functional concepts in an agent system to obtain the reference architecture. We analyzed three existing agent framework implementations: Cougaar, JADE, and AGLOBE. This methodology is applied to agent frameworks rather than deployed agent systems because the functional concepts defined in the Agent Systems Reference Model (ASRM) are already implemented in these frameworks. The main contribution of this paper is a methodology for creating an agent systems reference architecture through the application of reverse engineering methodologies combined with the modified 4+1 View Model used for documenting existing agent frameworks.