Assessing the Effect of Aspect Refactoring on Multi-Agent Applications

Abstract

Multi Agent Systems (MAS) are increasingly gaining importance as a powerful paradigm to designing and implementing distributed applications. However, existing multi-agent applications are developed without considering the separation of non-functional concerns from the functional ones. This makes the implementation, comprehension and maintenance of multi-agent applications hard tasks. Aspect-Oriented Refactoring (AOR) is a promising technique for improving modularity and reducing complexity of existing object oriented software systems by encapsulating crosscutting concerns. The authors present, in this paper, a new dynamic approach for investigating empirically the effect of AOR on MAS applications. They focus, particularly, on the effect of AOR on agent behavior in terms of communication. The proposed approach is supported by a multi-agent profiling tool working on AgentFactory platform.