Tailoring Agent Platforms with Software Product Lines

Agent platforms have been conceived traditionally as middleware, helping to deal with various application challenges like agent programming models, remote messaging, and coordination protocols. A middleware is typically a bundle of functionalities necessary to execute multi-agent applications. In contrast to this traditional view, nowadays different use cases also for selected agent concepts have emerged requiring also different kinds of functionalities. Examples include a platform for conducting multi-agent simulations, intelligent agent behavior models for controlling non-player characters (NPCs) in games and a lightweight version suited for mobile devices. A one-size-fits-all software bundle often does not sufficiently match these requirements, because customers and developers want solutions specifically tailored to their needs, i.e. a small but focused solution is frequently preferred over bloated software with extraneous functionality. Software product lines are an approach suitable for creating a series of similar products from a common code base. In this paper we will show how software product line modeling and technology can help creating tailor-made products from multi-agent platforms. Concretely, the Jadex platform will be analyzed and a feature model as well as an implementation path will be presented.