Objective Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems Engineering. Design and Implementation

Schumacher, M. (2001) Objective Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems Engineering. Design and Implementation. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 2039. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. ISBN 3-540-41982-9

Abstract

This book defines programming paradigms to support the design and the concurrent and distributed implementation of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). The modeling of MAS is proposed to be a bottom-up and interaction-oriented process, grouping existing autonomous agents and describing how they interact, thus managing the coordination of these agents. To that aim, we introduce the notions of objective coordination, which handles inter-agent dependencies (the organization of the environment and the agent interactions), and subjective coordination, which handles intra-agent dependencies often involving mentalistic categories. We then promote a methodology that focuses the modeling of MAS on objective coordination, and we propose the use of coordination models and corresponding languages in order to respectively support the design phase of a MAS and allow its implementation on a concurrent and distributed architecture. A general coordination model named ECM and a corresponding object-oriented coordination language named STL++ are then presented and validated with several applications.

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