Modelling Web Services in the agent-oriented modelling language and environment CAMLE

A particular difficulty in the development of Web Services applications is caused by the lack of communications between developers from different vendors. This paper investigates how modelling can help to solve the problem using the caste-centric agent-oriented modelling language and environment CAMLE, and illustrates the method by an example of online auction service. The use of CAMLE in model consistency check and specification generation is also discussed. Software engineers are enabled to specify not only the service provider's functionality and behaviour, but also the requirements and restrictions on service requesters' behaviours

A Methodology for Modelling Mobile Agent-Based Systems (Mobile agent Mobility Methodology - MaMM)

Mobile agents are a particular type of agents that have all the characteristics of an agent and also demonstrate the ability to move or migrate from one node to another in a network environment. Mobile agents have received considerable attention from industry and the research community in recent times due to the fact that their special characteristic of migration help address issues such as network overload, network latency and protocol encapsulation. Due to the current focus in exploiting agent technology mainly in a research environment, there has been an influx of software engineering methodologies for developing multi-agent systems. However, little attention has been given to modelling mobile agents. For mobile agent-based systems to become more widely accepted there is a critical need for a methodology to be developed to address various issues related to modelling mobility of agent . This research study provides an overview of the current approaches, methodologies and modelling languages that can be used for developing multi-agent systems. The overview indicates extensive research on methodologies for modelling multi-agent systems and little on mobility in mobile agent-based systems. An original contribution in this research known as Mobile agent-based Mobility Methodology (MaMM) is the methodology for modelling mobility in mobile agent-based systems using underlying principles of Genetic Algorithms (GA) with emphasis on fitness functions and genetic representation. Delphi study and case studies were employed in carrying out this research

A Framework for Agent-Based Service-Oriented Modelling

Service-oriented computing is becoming a direction of computing technology. For realising the mission of serviceoriented computing, service-oriented architecture has been proposed to facilitate the application development via discoverable services distributed on Internet. That brings out service-oriented modelling as a new technical area to provide modelling and analysis techniques of service-oriented applications. The paper proposes a framework for agentbased service-oriented modelling. It treats both the service providers and the service requesters as service agents. Domain ontology has been used to provide the sharable domain knowledge as well as terminology for allowing the agents to understand each others. A modelling process has also been illustrated with the model development of an online auction service

CIDE: An Integrated Development Environment for Microservices

Microservices is a flexible architectural style that has many advantages over the alternative monolithic style. These include better performance and scalability. It is particularly suitable, and widely adopted, for cloud-based applications, because in this architecture a software system consisting of a large suite of services of fine granularity, each running its own process and communicating with the others. However, programming such systems is more complex. In this paper we report on CIDE, an integrated software development environment that helps with this. CIDE supports programming in a novel agent-oriented language called CAOPLE and tests their execution in a cluster environment. We present the architecture of CIDE, discuss its design based on the principles of the DevOps software development methodology, and describe facilities that support continuous testing and seamless integration, two other advantages of Microservices

An Adaptive Casteship Mechanism for Developing Multi-Agent Systems

In this paper, we propose an adaptive casteship mechanism for modelling anddesigning adaptive Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In our approach, caste is the modular unit andabstraction that specify agents’ behaviour. Adaptive behaviours of agents are captured as the change of castes during their lifecycles by executing ‘join’, ‘quit’, ‘activate’ and ‘deactivate’operations on castes. The formal semantics of caste operations are rigorously defined. The properties of agent’s adaptive behaviours are formally specified and proved. A graphicalnotation of caste transition diagrams and a number of rules for check consistency are designed. An example is also presented throughout the paper

A Systematic Mapping Study in Microservice Architecture

The accelerating progress of network speed, reliability and security creates an increasing demand to move software and services from being stored and processed locally on users' machines to being managed by third parties that are accessible through the network. This has created the need to develop new software development methods and software architectural styles that meet these new demands. One such example in software architectural design is the recent emergence of the microservices architecture to address the maintenance and scalability demands of online service providers. As microservice architecture is a new research area, the need for a systematic mapping study is crucial in order to summarise the progress so far and identify the gaps and requirements for future studies. In this paper we present a systematic mapping study of microservices architectures and their implementation. Our study focuses on identifying architectural challenges, the architectural diagrams/views and quality attributes related to microsevice systems

A virtual machine for distributed agent-oriented programming

Agent-orientation has been considered as a viable solution to the development of software systems in dynamic environments such as the Internet. This paper presents a high level language virtual machine CAVM designed for distributed agent-oriented programming in the Internet environment. The main features of the virtual machine (VM) are two-fold. First, the communication between agents is separated from computation so that communication is network transparent of agent location. Second, code deployment is separated from loading so that multiple agents of the same caste can be dynamically distributed to the network and dynamical integrated into the systems by adding new agents. The paper first reviews the key features of an agent-oriented programming language called CAOPLE. It then presents the design of the virtual machine to support the implementation of the language. Experiments with the performance of the system in a network environment are also reported

FAML: a generic metamodel for MAS development

In some areas of software engineering research, there are several metamodels claiming to capture the main issues. Though it is profitable to have variety at the beginning of a research field, after some time, the diversity of metamodels becomes an obstacle, for instance to the sharing of results between research groups. To reach consensus and unification of existing metamodels, metamodel-driven software language engineering can be applied. This paper illustrates an application of software language engineering in the agent-oriented software engineering research domain. Here, we introduce a relatively generic agent-oriented metamodel whose suitability for supporting modeling language development is demonstrated by evaluating it with respect to several existing methodology-specific metamodels. First, the metamodel is constructed by a combination of bottom-up and top-down analysis and best practice. The concepts thus obtained and their relationships are then evaluated by mapping to two agent-oriented metamodels: TAO and Islander. We then refine the metamodel by extending the comparisons with the metamodels implicit or explicit within five more extant agent-oriented approaches: Adelfe, PASSI, Gaia, INGENIAS, and Tropos. The resultant FAML metamodel is a potential candidate for future standardization as an important component for engineering an agent modeling language