AOM4JADE: An Aspect-Oriented Monitoring Approach for JADE-based Multi-Agent Applications

Abstract

In Multi-Agent System (MAS), agents coordinate their behaviour aiming to achieve some collective goals. However, heterogeneous nature of agents and their autonomy make the coordination task exceedingly difficult and likewise the achievement of the ultimate system target. Consequently, it’s unavoidable to proceed with monitoring techniques in order to analyze and understand the dynamic behaviour of such a system. JAVA Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE) is a JAVA-based framework intensively used in academia to implement MAS. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm has proved its effectiveness to support software monitoring especially regarding MAS specificities. The combination of monitoring and AOP results in the appearance of a new technique known as Aspect-Oriented Monitoring (AOM). In this paper, we introduce AOM4JADE, an Aspect-Oriented Monitoring Approach for JADE-based Multi-Agent Applications. Proposed approach investigates three JADE foundations: FIPA-ACL-based Agents’ communication, agents’ behaviours and agents’ lifecycle. For each concept, we specify the integration of monitoring related aspects with JADE architecture using Aspect UML class diagram.