Why Use MAY¶

Why would you use MAY and SpeADL?

Component Orientation¶

MAY is an Eclipse plugin that let you describe component-oriented architecture.

Component-Orientation can be seen as an evolution of Object-Orientation: with components you describe what is provided (e.g., the methods of the objects) by the software entities you build, but you also describe what is required by you software entities (a bit like with dependency injection).
You then compose components together to decide who provides what to whom.
This simplify thinking about your code organisation and makes dependencies between modules and runtime entities explicit.

Many tools helps defining component-oriented architectures, MAY is different from the rest by really easing the passing between high-level models of your architecture in SpeADL and their implementation in Java.
Everything is strongly typed and linked: changes in your architectures directly impacts your implementation and when it compiles, it means that your architecture and its implementation is structurally correct.

MAY is for example used to teach component-orientation to Master students.

Dynamic Runtime Architectures¶

SpeADL is a language that introduces novel abstractions called species and ecosystems especially for architectures with dynamically created components.

When components are created dynamically at runtime, describing how they are connected to each others can become complex: the abstractions provided by SpeADL helps to easily separate concerns and compose them without introducing boiler-plate.

Multi-Agent Systems Development¶

Multi-Agent Systems are software systems with a specific architectural style: they have many software entities called agents that are living in an environment that mediates their interactions.

Using the same ecosystem and species abstractions, SpeADL is particularly adequate for developing an infrastructure tailored to the specific needs of your MAS and its software environment.
To adapt to your domain-specific need , these abstractions enables to build :

• Tailored environment-agent relations.
• Tailored inter-agent relations mediated by the environment.