Abstract
The Android platform has popularized and caused a widespread adoption of its application development approach based on loosely coupled application components. This loose coupling allows for a flexible composition of applications but also enables invocations and reuse of individual components from third-party applications.
One problem with the original Android design is that the rather coarse-grained application components themselves prohibit more fine-grained decomposition. To provide more flexible loosely coupled components and also to foster the reuse of more elementary fine-grained functionality, we suggest the extension of Android application components with our concept of μ-agents. Moreover, the organisational aspects of the μ-agent model introduce means to structure functionality in a more systematic manner.
In this article, we introduce our platform concept called Micro-agents on Android (MOA) that realizes the integration of application development principles with a lightweight notion of agency. Several scenarios are used to describe the benefit from functionality reuse across applications enabled by MOA. A performance evaluation demonstrates that μ-agents interact in a more efficient manner than Android services, making them well-suited for fine-grained decomposition.
Our approach serves as an example showing how existing technology can benefit from utilizing the modelling advantages of agent-based technologies.
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Frantz, C., Nowostawski, M., Purvis, M.K. (2012). Augmenting Android with AOSE Principles for Enhanced Functionality Reuse in Mobile Applications. In: Dechesne, F., Hattori, H., ter Mors, A., Such, J.M., Weyns, D., Dignum, F. (eds) Advanced Agent Technology. AAMAS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7068. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27216-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27216-5_13
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