Malaca: A component and aspect-oriented agent architecture

The production of maintainable and reusable agents depends largely on how well the agent architecture is modularized. Most commercial agent toolkits provide an Object-Oriented (OO) framework, whose agent architecture does not facilitate separate (re)use of the domain-specific functionality of an agent from other concerns. This paper presents Malaca, an agent architecture that combines the use of Component-based Software Engineering and Aspect-Oriented Software Development, both of which promote better modularization of the agent architecture while increase at the architectural level. Malaca supports the separate (re)use of the domain-specific functionality of an agent from other communication concerns, providing explicit support for the design and configuration of agent architectures and allows the development of agent-based software so that it is easy to understand, maintain and reuse.