Multi-Agent Microservices: Integrating Multi-Agent Systems within Microservice-based Architectures

Computing has been trending towards distribution more and more over time, from monolithic software architectures, to service-oriented architectures and we are now currently in the era of the microservice. Microservices (MS) have emerged from the software community due to necessity as a means of allowing for the replication of individual parts of systems to prevent bottlenecks, enabling testing of individual parts of systems and componentising systems for individual teams to be responsible for their development. MS generally utilise the REST architectural style that underpins the World Wide Web by exposing an API that allows other services in an MS architecture to interact with it. A core tenet of the REST architectural style is the ability to create a layer of abstraction to represent the underlying components using hyper-media. One of the issues facing the software community at present is the complexity of the interaction between omponents. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), as a research discipline, has a plethora of research in the interaction, collaboration and coordination of autonomous, intelligent computational units but has struggled to achieve widespread adoption amongst the software engineering community. This can be attributed to reasons such as systems being overhauled to introduce MAS concepts as well as the adoption of a new programming paradigm amongst software engineers. This thesis seeks to showcase that the MS architectural style provides the ideal basis to integrate MAS technologies and concepts so as to take advantage of all the research surrounding the interaction of heterogeneous components that has been done in this area. By taking advantage of technologies such as containerisation that have emerged to support MS architectures, this can help to facilitate the adoption of MAS within industrial standard software structures. Through the encapsulation of MAS technology, exposed as an MS, to provide concepts such as Organisation as a Service (OaaS). This can allow software engineers the ability to utilise MAS technology without having to learn a whole new paradigm.