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Abstract

In multi-agent systems, the yellow pages service is very important for agents to be able to interact with each other. The more the number of agents is high, the more performance degradation will result, due to the overload of requests sent to central yellow pages. This issue didn’t get much attention from researchers despite its importance. The proposed approach for solving this scalability issue is based on the aspect-oriented paradigm. An aspect was used to play the roles of a replicator and a distributor of requests to several new yellow pages. The use of aspect-oriented programming simplifies the implementation, reduces the maintenance effort and offers a good reusability of the proposed solution. The approach is validated on three JADE applications and evaluated on five different machines. Results, which are very promising, show a significant scalability and performance improvement of the yellow pages service especially on Linux operating system.

Keywords

Perfective maintenance performance scalability yellow pages multi-agent systems

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