ANDROMEDA (ANDROid eMbeddED Agent platform) is an agent platform specifically oriented to embedded agents over the Android operating system. The agents developed inside this platform are based on the agent-&pi meta-model.
Android can be seen as a software system specifically designed for mobile devices which includes an operating system, a middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK. Applications are written using the Java programming language and they run on Dalvik (the Android Virtual Machine), a custom virtual machine designed for embedded use, which runs on top of a Linux kernel.
Currently, there is a large amount of agent models that provide a highlevel description of their components and their functionality. To define the agent model presented in this work, some of the most used and complete agent model proposals have been studied. The purpose of this study was to extract their common features and adapt them to the current proposal. In this way, Tropos, Gaia, Opera, Ingenias and AML have been considered, because they are the most commonly used. The agent model proposed is shown in Figure 1 and provides an abstract vision of its main components, concepts and their existing relationship. It is called agent-&pi (agent-PI: agent Platform Independent). The main components and basic concepts employed in the meta-model are summarized in Table 1.
The proposed ANDROMEDA platform includes all the abstract concepts of the agent-p meta-model. The implementation was done using the main API components of Android (SDK 1.0, Release 1). Thereby this agent platform inserts a new layer in the Android system architecture. This new layer, is called ANDROMEDA and modifies the Android architecture, as seen in Figure 2.
