Developing a Family of Software Agents with Fine­grained Variability: an Exploratory Study

This paper presents an exploratory study of the development of a family of software agents, in which we had to adopt appropriate techniques to allow building agents using reusable assets that address the domain vari­ ability. This agents family was built using a Software Product Line (SPL) ar­ chitecture with fine­grained variability. We describe the development of our case study, the Buyer agent SPL, and report lessons learned mainly related to the following points: variability types that we dealt with, how current Multi­ agent System (MAS) methodologies are able to document variability and provide mechanisms to enable software reuse, and adopted implementation techniques.