Towards a MAS product line engineering approach

Les Systèmes Multi-Agents (SMA) représentent une solution idéale qui a fait ses preuves pour la modélisation de systèmes complexes. L’ingénierie des SMA offre différentes méthodologies, méta-modèles, templates et patrons de réutilisation qui facilitent leur développement et accélère leur acceptation au sein de l’industrie du logiciel. Cependant, les approches existantes de l’ingénierie des SMA ne permettent pas la gestion et le développement d’applications similaires dites familles de SMA. Ces applications présentent des points communs, et des différences appelées variabilité. La gestion de la variabilité peut se faire à différents niveaux (conception, développement et autre), sauf qu’elle n’est pas prise en considération dans les approches existantes. Afin de pallier à la non gestion de variabilité au sein des familles multi-agents au niveau des approches orientées agents, l’ingénierie de Lignes de Produits logiciels s’avère être la solution idoine pour laquelle la gestion de la variabilité reste un élément clé. Dans ce contexte, l’exploitation des techniques d’ingénierie de LdPL dans le cadre d’approches multi-agents est connue sous l’appellation d’ingénierie MAS-PL (Multi-agent systems Product Lines). Le présent sujet de thèse s’inscrit dans cette thématique d’approches MAS-PL afin d’améliorer la gestion de la variabilité au sein de familles de SMA, et par conséquent rendre meilleurs les aspects de réutilisation s’articulant autour de la variabilité. Notre approche repose sur le processus général des LdPL, repousse les limites des approches MAS-PL actuelles. L’originalité de notre approche est qu’elle permet une réutilisation indépendante du domaine d’application.Multi-Agent Systems represent an ideal solution that has already proved positive for the modelling of complex systems. The AOSE (Agent Oriented Software Engineering) offers different methodologies, meta-models, templates and reuse patterns that facilitate their development and accelerate their acceptance within the software industry. However, the existing approaches to MAS engineering do not allow the management and development of similar applications known as MAS families. These applications have some commonalities, as well as differences called variability. The management of variability can be done at different levels such as design and development, except that it is not taken into account in existing approaches. In order to compensate for the lack of variability management within multi-agent families at the level of agent-oriented approaches, SPL (Software Product Lines) engineering turns out to be the appropriate solution for which the management of variability remains a key element. In this context, the exploitation of SPL engineering techniques within the framework of multi-agent approaches is known as Multi-agent systems Product Lines engineering. This thesis subject is part of this thematic of MAS-PL approaches meant to enhance the management of variability within families of MAS; what, consequently, improves the aspects of reuse revolving around variability. This is how our approach, which is based on the general SPL process, in favour of an improvement, pushes the limits of current MAS-PL approaches

Towards a MAS Product Line Engineering Approach

International audienceIt is our claim that the adoption of software engineering reuse techniques can leverage MAS development, mostly when we consider similar applications belonging to the same domain. MAS-Product Line (MAS-PL) raises as an interesting approach that uses Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) techniques and AOSE to manage the common-alities (similarities) and variabilities (differences) of such MAS applications. Although MAS present specific characteristics that could be considered when describing the system variability, existing work on MAS-PL is devoted to deal with MAS variability considering only domain-specific issues. Moreover, the adoption of variability models such as feature models should be considered for describing both Generic and Specific MAS variability. We propose a MAS-PL approach to address the aforemen-tioned issues by representing Generic MAS variability according to MAS concepts such as agents, environment, interaction and organization, and Specific MAS variability according to a specific application domain. We evaluate the approach by deriving a family of agents that perform jobs in the Multi-Agent Contest environment