Promoting Advanced Separation of Concerns in Intra-Agent and Inter-Agent Software Engineering

Agent technology has been revisited as a complementary approach to the object paradigm. Although objects and agents have many similarities, the introduction of agents in the object model poses challenging problems because many system-level and agent-level properties are intrusive and overlapping. In this way, a disciplined approach is required for composition. We present our approach for dealing with the intricacies of developing agent systems using the recent advances of separation of concerns techniques, including aspect-oriented programming and computational reflection.