A Dynamic Reconfigurable Electronic Business System Based On Agents

This thesis puts forward the crisis of the present large-scale enterprise application software which is from an article named "no silver bullet" on "IEEE Computer" in 1986 written by famous computer scientist Brookes. With a thorough analysis of the enterprise application software crisis and software designing technologies,a new software architecture based on dynamic reconfigurable agents is presented as a promising solution for the current demand for high quality, scalable and flexible software. The idea of this thesis is based on two different foundations: the former is the software architecture and dynamic system reconfiguration technology, extensions of current technologies which have been developed to overcome the software crisis; the latter is the newly emerged intelligent software agent technology, a inter-discipline product of combined contributions from artificial intelligence researchers, cognition researchers and computer science researchers In the thesis, the two foundations are put together to generate a new paradigm for software analysis, design and development. The thesis focuses on dissertating how to improve the reusability, scalability and reconfigurability in order to resolve the above-mentioned software crisis and then found the "silver bullet to perish the person-wolf".The history of software architecture,dynamic system reconfiguration and software agents technologies are carefully analyzed, which demonstrates the behind-the-scene hand exert the pushing force and its necessity. The features and advantages for each technology are also discussed. Then as for being prevalent electronic business developing technology today, J2EE architecture and XML language are introduced in the paper. The J2EE multi-layer architecture, application frame and pattern are analyzed. Besides which, the design rule should obeyed in J2EE software design is also put forward. In the final chapters,the suggested software architecture is put into real use case for testing. In the first case, a new software architecture based on dynamic reconfigurable agents is presented in an example application system in which the management of web station content is implemented. The software architecture based on dynamic reconfigurable agents is successfully used in this case, which also proves that the software one is fit for large-scale system development and can provide satisfactory response time. In the second case, being developed with EJB technology, an invite public bidding system for medical products is given. In related chapters a long-range EJB method-invoking frame is observed and the conception of agent is also applied in the case. These practical cases show that the suggested software architecture and dynamic reconfigurable agent technology are more efficiently in factual application.