Dynamic Reconfiguration of Agent-Based Applications

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of dynamic application reconfiguration. We show that the addition of event-driven agents to an application built from interconnected components greatly improves the ability to reconfigure the application while in operation, for customization or added functionalities. Our preliminary experience is based on a specific architecture of interconnected components and agents, used for several distributed applications, including a firewall system. 1 Introduction In recent years, the software engineering community has devoted many efforts to the development of techniques and tools to support the design and implementation of applications to be distributed across networks and workstations. Some of this focus has been on support for initial development and configuration of applications while other research has focused on techniques to support these types of applications at runtime. We are currently conducting research intended to develop techniques for supporting...