Designing and managing evolving systems using a MAS product line approach

We view an evolutionary system as being a software product line. The core architecture is the unchanging part of the system, and each version of the system may be viewed as a product from the product line. Each “product” may be described as the core architecture with some agent-based additions. The result is a multiagent system software product line. We describe an approach to such a software product line-based approach using the MaCMAS agent-oriented methodology. The approach scales to enterprise architectures as a multiagent system is an appropriate means of representing a changing enterprise architecture and the interaction between components in it. In addition, we reduce the gap between the enterprise architecture and the software architecture. Keywords: Multiagent systems product lines; Enterprise architecture evolution; Swarm-based systems