The Adaptive Agent Model Software Adaptivity through Dynamic.docVIP

The Adaptive Agent Model: Software Adaptivity through Dynamic Agents and XML-based Business Rules Liang Xiao and Des Greer School of Computer Science, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK email: { l.xiao, des.greer }@qub.ac.uk Abstract The Adaptive Agent Model (AAM) achieves adaptivity in three areas. i) Agents are associated with business rules. These rules are configured by business analysts in a natural language style, using a Business Rules Editor, stored in an XML repository and executed by agents. ii) The vocabularies of rules are easily changed. A Metadata Editor is described for this purpose, allowing business analysts to dynamically create new objects/attributes or edit existing ones during the operation of the software system. Once new rules involving new vocabularies are defined and assigned to agents, they will take effect immediately at run-time, reflecting new policies and ontologies available to the system. iii) The collaboration between agents can be modified. We describe an Architecture Editor which facilitates control of the agent interaction. Adaptivity in these three areas, using the associated editors, is demonstrated. The approach ensures that agents implement up-to-date requirements, reflecting desired current behaviour, without the need for frequent system rebuilds. AAM is illustrated and evaluated using of an e-business example. Introduction Software evolution and maintenance is expensive and accounts for the majority of software lifecycle costs [1]. To make systems more adaptable, effort has been concentrated on making them easily changed by engineers. Better still, would be the ability to make systems adaptive, where systems change their behaviour according to their context [2]. In the next section we discuss various approaches towards making systems adaptive. Section 3 describes related work and the motivation of using agents and business rules for adaptivity. Section 4 starts with a case study selected to illustrate