Components, Features, and Agents in the ABC

In this paper, we show how the concepts of objects, components, features and agents are used today in the Agent Building Center (ABC) environment in order to marry the modelling of functionally complex communication systems at the application level with an objectoriented, component based implementation. In particular the ABC enables domain experts, designers, and test engineers to graphically design both the complex application logic and its test cases in terms of automata-like models, which can be automatically checked for their intended purpose via model checking, and compiled down to executable code. Characteristic of the ABC is the coarse-grained approach to modelling and design, which guarantees the scalability to capture large complex systems. Together with our lightweight coordination approach to describe the interplay of the different features and components, this induces an understandable modelling paradigm of system-wide business processes, which is adequate for the needs and requirements of industrial application developers.