Architectural Evaluation of Collaborative Agent-Based Systems

摘要

The Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method(Service Marks) (ATAM(Service Marks)) is an architecture evaluation technique currently evolving at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). ATAM has been applied to a number of command and control, real time, and information systems. As collaborative, autonomous agents become a significant software technology, the demand for evaluating the quality attributes of the architectures of agent based systems will increase. Very broadly, agents may be thought of as software entities that have the ability to undertake action autonomously in their particular embedded environment, according to a typically general set of requests or desired goals, and that are able to communicate with other agents as determined by their own initiative. Given an agent system architecture, we need scenarios that could be applicable for conducting ATAM evaluations on instances of that agent architecture. This report identifies a few features in agent based systems that could be used to classify agent system architectures and to guide the generation of scenarios applicable to these architectures.