FROM A RESEARCH TO AN INDUSTRY-STRENGTH AGENT PLATFORM: JADEX V2

Since the beginning of the nineties multi-agent systems have been seen as a promising new software paradigm that is capable to overcome conceptual weaknesses of mainstream object-oriented software solutions. Despite these theoretical advantages, in practice agent software is rarely used and as software paradigm has been widely superseded by the service-oriented architecture. One key reason for the slow adoption of agent-based ideas is that existing agent software in most cases does not provide business-relevant features such as persistency or scalability. Hence, in this paper it is analyzed which essential business requirements exist and a solution agent platform architecture is presented. This architecture has been implemented within the Jadex V2 agent platform, which is a complete overhaul of the V1 architecture

Extending the Communication Capabilities of Agents

Agent technology is in principle well suited for realizing various kinds of distributed systems, but in practice agents are seldomly chosen for realizing real-world applications. One reason hindering agents being used in practice is their cumbersome communication mechanism focused on speech act based message exchange which makes them hard for practitioners used to work in an object oriented way. To broaden the application spectrum of agent technology in practice and make them more accessible for object-oriented developers, this paper presents additional communication means for agents. First, it will be shown how agents can interact using strongly typed service interfaces resorting to asynchronous future based methods. These allow keeping agents autonomous and further support several recurrent interaction patterns within one method call, i.e. without having to use complex message protocols. Second, an extension for binary data streaming via virtual connections will be presented. Its usage resembles established input and output streaming APIs and lets developers transfer data between agents in the same simple way as e.g. a file is written to hard disk. Furthermore, virtual connections allow failure tolerant transmission by multiplexing data across different physical connections. Usefulness of the extensions will be further explained with a real-word example application from the area of business intelligence workflows

Systematically Engineering Self-Organizing Systems: The SodekoVS Approach

Self-organizing systems promise new software quality attributes that are very hard to obtain using standard software engineering approaches. In accordance with the visions of e.g. autonomic computing and organic computing, self-organizing systems promote self-adaptability as one major property helping to realize software that can manage itself at runtime. In this respect, self-adaptability can be seen as a necessary foundation for realizing e.g. self* properties such as self-configuration or self-protection. However, the systematic development of systems exhibiting such properties challenges current development practices. The SodekoVS project addresses the challenge to purposefully engineer adaptivity by proposing a new approach that considers the system architecture as well as the software development methodology as integral intertwined aspects for system construction. Following the proposed process, self-organizing dynamics, inspired by biological, physical and social systems, can be integrated into applications by composing modules that distribute feedback control structures among system entities. These compositions support hierarchical as well as completely decentralized solutions without a single point of failure. This novel development conception is supported by a reference architecture, a tailored programming model as well as a library of ready to use self-organizing patterns. The key challenges, recent research activities, application scenarios as well as intermediate results are discussed

Keeping Pace with Changes - Towards Supporting Continuous Improvements and Extensive Updates in Manufacturing Automation Software

Every long-term used software system ages. Even though intangible goods like software do not degenerate in the proper sense, each software system degenerates in relation to the everlasting changes of requirements, usage scenarios and environmental conditions. Accordingly, operational software is commonly situated in a continuous evolution process in which manually conducted modifications and adaptations try to preserve or reinforce its quality. Unfortunately, such an unmanaged evolution inevitably leads to a discrepancy between the obsolete originally documented requirements and the updated software itself. For this reason, our contribution presents a coherent vision of an anti-aging cycle that preserves (non-)functional requirements as explicit runtime artefacts. The fulfilment of these requirements is validated based on conditionally triggered online test cases. In order to achieve an enhanced semantic test coverage, these test cases are adapted by monitoring, analysing and learning typical system behaviours. To explain our vision in more detail and demonstrate the benefit of a managed software evolution, our anti-aging cycle is exemplarily applied on the domain of manufacturing automation

Macro Architecture for Microservices: Improving Internal Quality of Microservice Systems

Microservices have established themselves as a common software engineering pattern for large-scale systems. However, while the focus of the approach on maximum flexibility for development of individual services has increased software development efficiency, the inter-service architecture of microservice-based systems has received little attention, resulting in systems with a multitude of confounding and poorly planned interactions between services, impeding initial development, maintenance and continued development of applications. This paper identifies three areas that currently require improvement in order to address the global architectural challenges of microservice systems. Furthermore, a solution is proposed for each of the areas with an implementation demonstrating how the proposed solution can improve development efficiency for and internal quality of microservice systems.101112102

Jadex: Implementing a BDI-Infrastructure for JADE Agents

Intelligent agents are a modelling paradigm, based on the notion of agents with mental states. The agent metaphor is nowadays used in many research and industry projects, and several generic agent platforms are available. Nevertheless, there is a gap between platforms concentrating on agent communication infrastructure and platforms concerned with the representation of internal agent concepts. This article presents an approach to bridge this gap: Jadex, an add-on to the widely used JADE agent platform. The add-on follows the BDI architecture, a well-known model for representing mentalistic concepts in the system design and implementation. The article provides an overview of the BDI model, and the design and realization in Jadex, as well as the integration of the add-on into the JADE agent framework