An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

[서평]「Component Software」 - Beyond Object-Oriented Programming -

In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives.This article1 provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.

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Search-based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

Microsoft has promoted ASP.NET’s new web services more than almost any other part of the.NET Framework. But despite their efforts, confusion is still widespread about what a web service is and, more importantly, what it’s meant to accomplish. This chapter introduces web services and explains their role in Microsoft’s vision of the programmable web. Along the way, you’ll learn about the open standards plumbing that allows web services to work and removes some of the confusion surrounding technical terms like WSDL (Web Service Description Language), SOAP, and UDDI (universal description, discovery, and integration).

Web Services Architecture

In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to software engineering in which search based optimisation algorithms are used to address problems in Software Engineering. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the Software Engineering lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and re-engineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semi-automated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This paper provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The paper identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.

/pdf/search-based-software-engineering-a-comprehensive-analysis-h98ne3mmop.pdf

Search Based Software Engineering: A Comprehensive Analysis and Review of Trends Techniques and Applications

New software architectures based on multi-agents or software components allow the integration of separately developed software pieces that interact through various communication schemes. In such a context, reliability raises new important issues. This paper aims at increasing reliability in multi-agent systems (MASs) and, therefore, focuses on the study of an appropriate exception handling system (EHS). The issues specific to exception handling in MASs – preservation of the agent paradigm and support of cooperative concurrency – are presented and discussed. This paper analyses existing EHSs according to these issues and describes our proposition, the Sage system, which integrates various solutions from existing EHSs and adapts them to the agent paradigm. Sage is an exception handling system dedicated to MASs that addresses the stressed issues by providing means to coordinate the collective activities of agents, to embbed contextualized handlers in agents and to concert exceptions. It has been implemented and integrated in the MadKit MAS. It has been experimented with a classical travel agency case study.

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Improving Exception Handling in Multi-agent Systems

Migrating software product variants which are deemed similar into a product line is a challenging task with main impact in software reengineering. To exploit existing software variants to build a software product line (SPL), the first step is to mine the feature model of this SPL which involves extracting common and optional features. Thus, we propose, in this paper, a new approach to mine features from the object-oriented source code of software variants by using lexical and structural similarity. To validate our approach, we applied it on ArgoUML, Health Watcher and Mobile Media software. The results of this evaluation showed that most of the features were identified1.

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Mining features from the object-oriented source code of software variants by combining lexical and structural similarity

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a theoretical framework which structures a set of objects described by properties. In order to migrate software product variants which are considered similar into a product line, it is essential to identify the common and the optional features between the software product variants. In this paper, we present an approach for feature location in a collection of software product variants based on FCA. In order to validate our approach we applied it on a case study based on ArgoUML. The results of this evaluation showed that all of the features were identified.

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Feature Location in a Collection of Software Product Variants Using Formal Concept Analysis

Companies often develop in a non-disciplined manner a set of software variants that share some features and differ in others to meet variant-specific requirements. To exploit existing software variants and manage them coherently as a software product line, a feature model must be built as a first step.
To do so, it is necessary to extract mandatory and optional features from the code of the variants in addition to associate each feature implementation with its name. In previous work, we automatically extracted a set of feature implementations as a set of source code elements of software variants and documented the mined feature implementations based on the use-case diagrams of these variants.
In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to organize the mined documented features into a feature model. The feature model is a tree which highlights mandatory features, optional features and feature groups (and, or, xor groups). The feature model is completed with requirement and mutual exclusion constraints.
We rely on Formal Concept Analysis and software configurations to mine a unique and consistent feature model. To validate our approach, we apply it on several case studies. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and performance of our proposal as most of the features and their associated constraints are correctly identified.

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Reverse Engineering Feature Models from Software Configurations using Formal Concept Analysis

The increased popularity of web services is accompanied with an increase in both provider and service number. This fairly large service number causes a deficiency in the selection of the most pertinent service, and makes it an effortful and time-consuming task.We propose the WSPAB (Web Service Personal Address Book) tool that aims at defining a complete solution for facilitating the task of finding the most pertinent web service. This includes two sub tasks, discovering and selecting. In this paper, we present the first part of the tool concerning the automation of the selection process, taking into consideration the quality of service (QoS) and user preferences. The WSPAB accomplishes the automatic selection of a service by filtering web services according to certain aspects of QoS and certain user requirements; then classifying these services using the formal concept analysis (FCA) approach, enabling users to easily select their needed service, identify its potential substitutes and keep trace of them either for future use, or to be shared with others.

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Christelle Urtado

Papers

Improving Exception Handling in Multi-agent Systems

Mining features from the object-oriented source code of software variants by combining lexical and structural similarity

Feature Location in a Collection of Software Product Variants Using Formal Concept Analysis

Reverse Engineering Feature Models from Software Configurations using Formal Concept Analysis

WSPAB: A Tool for Automatic Classification & Selection of Web Services Using Formal Concept Analysis