Advanced separation of concerns in agent-oriented design patterns. (6th March 2009)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Silva, Carla; Castro, Jaelson; Araujo, Joao; Moreira, Ana; Tedesco, Patricia; Mylopoulos, John
• Is Part Of: International journal of agent-oriented software engineering. Volume 3:Number 2/3(2009)
• Page Start: 306
• Page End: 327
• Publication Date: 2009-03-06
• Subjects: agent-oriented design -- design patterns -- agent-oriented software engineering -- social patterns -- multi-agent systems -- MAS -- agent pattern specification -- agent-based systems -- separation of concerns -- coupling -- cohesion -- size; Intelligent agents (Computer software) -- Periodicals; Software engineering -- Periodicals; Systems software -- Periodicals; 005.12
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1746-1375

Abstract

Social patterns are agent-oriented design patterns that have been conceived to reflect the social and intentional features that are recurrent in cooperative and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). The goal of this paper is to present a social pattern description technique called Agent Pattern Specification (APS), which takes into account the separation of pattern-related concerns in the MAS design level. We also use aspect-oriented programming to separate pattern-specific concerns in the MAS implementation level and evaluate it by using a suite of metrics for assessing well-known software engineering attributes such as the separation of concerns, coupling, cohesion and size. Our assessment suggests that the aspect-oriented solutions for mediation patterns improve the separation of pattern-related concerns.