Title: Advanced separation of concerns in agent-oriented design patterns

Authors: Carla Silva, Jaelson Castro, Joao Araujo, Ana Moreira, Patricia Tedesco, John Mylopoulos

Addresses: CIn, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil; FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. ' CIn, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil. ' FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. ' FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. ' CIn, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil. ' University of Toronto, Canada

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.

Keywords: 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.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOSE.2009.023641

International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2009 Vol.3 No.2/3, pp.306 - 327

Published online: 04 Mar 2009 *

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