Unifying Agent and Component Concepts: Jadex Active Components

The construction of distributed applications is a challenging task due to inherent system properties like message passing and concurrency. Current technology trends further increase the necessity for novel software concepts that help dealing with these issues. An analysis of existing software paradigms has revealed that each of them has its specic strengths and weaknesses but none ts all the needs. On basis of this evaluation in this paper a new approach called active components is proposed. Active components are a consolidation of the agent paradigm, combining it with advantageous concepts of other types of software components. Active components, like agents, are autonomous with respect to their execution. Like software components, they are managed entities, which exhibit clear interfaces making their functionality explicit. The approach considerably broadens the scope of applications that can be built as heterogeneous component types, e.g. agents and workows, can be used in the sa...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MATES
• Authors: Alexander Pokahr, Lars Braubach, Kai Jander
• Keywords: Active Component, Intelligent Agents, Jadex Active Component, MATES 2010, Software Components