A Multi-Agent Distributed Scripting System for COTS-Based Distributed Software Integration

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to distributed commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) based software integration by using the concepts of a multi-agent system and the distributed scripting mechanism. COTS software products are increasingly used to be software components in large-scale systems. Most organisations try to gain the promises of rapidly development and lower cost from reusing COTS components. Nevertheless, COTS-based software system development needs an efficient and useful integration approach. We developed a multi-agent system as an execution platform for distributed COTS software products. Instead of an RPC-like invocation approach, we adopt mobile agents to interoperate COTS software. We also developed a scripting mechanism for helping the software integrator to write a gluer. By using our scripting language constructs and the associated rules, a software integrator can easily write various scripts in various styles. To illustrate this multi-agent system, a distributed CPU-utilisation data collection system, is experimented in our study. Finally, we also successfully developed a graphical user interface tool that would be beneficial and useful for software integrator to edit, debug and display script programs and results.