Towards Preventive Control for Open MAS - An Aspect-based Approach

摘要

In Open MAS (Open Multi Agent Systems), agents can freely join and leave systems at any time. The inherent specificities of such systems like dynamicity, non-determinism and emergency make their target states difficult to achieve. Agents, in Open MAS, are often heterogeneous, self-interested with conflicting individual goals and limited trust. Consequently, newly entered (external) agents are often considered as a potential disturbance of systems. In this paper, we present a novel preventive control approach based on Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm for mastering Open MAS' behaviour. The proposed control process is mainly accomplished in two steps: (1) Observing agents movements by intercepting all external requests of agents wanting accessing to the system. A request analysis process will be held in terms of compliance capabilities presented by this agent, and (2) Deciding, based on AspectJ constructors, either to allow agents if the capabilities they have enable a possible progress in actual system state to the target state, or prevent it otherwise. The proposed approach is illustrated using a MaDKit-based application.