The architecture of a multi-agent system can naturally be viewed as an organised society of individuals (i.e., as a computational organisation). For this reason, we believe organisational abstractions should play a central role in the analysis and design of such systems. To this end, the concepts of agent roles and role models are increasingly being used to specify and design multi-agent systems. However, this is not the full picture. In t...

Multi-agent systems... In this paper we introduce three additional organisational concepts - organisational rules, organisational structures, and organisational patterns - and discuss why we believe they are necessary for the complete specification of computational organisations. In particular, we focus on the concept of organisational rules and introduce a formalism, based on temporal logic, to specify them. This formalism is then used to drive the definition of the organisational structure and the identification of the organisational patterns. Finally, the paper sketches some guidelines for a methodology for agent-oriented systems based on our expanded set of organisational abstractions.

The metaphors of autonomous agents and agent societies havethepotential to make a signi cant impact on the processes of analysis, design, and development of complex software systems on the Internet. In this chapter, we concentrate predominantly on agent societies, and show howwork on coordination models and technologies provides apowerful framework for the engineering of Internet-based, multi-agent systems. First, we introduce the concepts of agent, multi-agent system, and agent-oriented software engineering, and highlight the speci c issues that arise when we take the Internet as the environment thatagents inhabit. We thenprovide a brief survey of the state of the art in the area of agent-oriented methodologies, paying particular attention to the Gaia methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. Gaia was originally conceived for benevolent agents inhabiting closed systems. However, to broaden its scope, we show how insights from the area of coordination models can be incorporated in order to make it more suitable for developing Internet-based applications.

Direct interaction and explicit communication are not always the best approaches for achieving coherent systemic behaviour in the context of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). This is evident when taking into account recent approaches dealing with environment-based coordination such as stigmergy and, more generally, mediated interaction. In this paper we propose a conceptual, formal and engineering framework based on the notion of coordination artifact, which aims at generally systematising implicit communication and environment-based coordination for heterogeneous, possibly intelligent agents. The features and benefits of our approach are exemplified in the Follow-me situation, where an agent’s action/plan is considered as a model for the action/plan of other agents. We model this class of problems in terms of coordination artifacts, from simple to more challenging cases, stressing the advantages with respect to more “standard ” MAS approaches. 1.

The design and development of Internet applications, requiring dynamic and possibly mobile access to Internet resources, can take advantage of an approach based on autonomous mobile agents. However, mobility introduces peculiar issues related to the modeling and management of the agents' coordination activities. This paper introduces context-dependent coordination as a framework for the design and development of Internet applications based on mobile agents, and shows how it can be supported by a proper coordination infrastructure. Context-dependent coordination is centered on the notion of programmable coordination media, as the software abstraction via which an agent, in an Internet site, can access to local resources and coordinate with local agents.

this paper, this s ection wills how the impact of a coordination model on the des ign and implementation of a multiagents ys tem, by dis cus s ing the cas es tudy of a multiagents ys tem in charge of managing the review proces s for an international conference [2]. Firs t, we will briefly compare two di#erent approaches to the problem, according to a data-driven [12] and a control-driven [13] model. Then, we will dis cus s an hybrid approach, exploiting the TuCSoN coordination model for multiagents ys tems [10]. As a res ult, wes hould be able to point outs everal relevant cons equences of adopting a coordination viewpoint on the engineering of a multiagents ys tem, which are all bas ically related to thes eparation of concerns between the computation and the coordination is s ues , or, in other terms , between individual and s cial ta s s .des gn focus -- agent interaction protocols can be des gned by focusO ng on its individual tas k(s ) (e.g., concentrating on the information needed and produced/inferred by the agent in the proces s of achieving its tas ks ), in manys ens e dis regarding thes ocial tas k(s ) of the groups the agent belongs to;

Klaim is a process language that permits programming distributed systems made up of several mobile components interacting through multiple distributed tuple spaces.

Agent Programming Language "triple-a-p-l") is a programming language for implementing cognitive agents that have beliefs, goals, and plans as mental attitudes, can generate and revise their plans to achieve their goals, and are able to interact with each other and with the environment they share with other agents. The first version of 3APL was designed by Hindriks et al. at Utrecht University [28]. Since its initial design, the 3APL programming language has been subject to continuous development [17, 16].

Abstract not found

This paper presents XMARS, a programmable coordination architecture for Internet applications based on mobile agents. In XMARS, agents coordinate -- both with each other and with their current execution environment -- through programmable XML dataspaces, accessed by agents in a Linda-like fashion. This suits very well the characteristics of the Internet environment: on the one hand, it offers all the advantages of XML in terms of interoperability and standard representation of information; on the other hand, it enforces open and uncoupled interactions, as required by the dynamicity of the environment and by the mobility of the application components. In addition, coordination in XMARS is made more flexible and secure by the capability of programming the behaviour of the coordination media in reaction to the agents' accesses. An application example related to the management of on-line academic courses shows the suitability and the effectiveness of the XMARS architecture. Ke...