Exploiting the Environment for Coordinating Agent Intentions

One interesting family of MAS applications is characterized (1) by their large scale in terms of number of agents and physical distribution, (2) by their very dynamic nature and (3) by their complex functional and non-functional requirements. This family includes a. o. manufacturing control, traffic control and web service coordination. For this family, the complexity of the software for the individual agents using traditional BDI-approaches is overwhelming. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to BDI which alleviates agent complexity through “delegate MASs”, which use the environment and its resources to obtain BDI functionality. Delegate MASs consist of light-weight agents, which are issued either by resources for building and maintaining information on the environment, or by task agents in order to explore the options on behalf of the agents and to coordinate their intentions. We describe the approach, and validate it in a case study of manufacturing control. The evaluation in this case study shows the feasibility of the approach in coping with the large scale of the application and shows that the approach elegantly achieves flexibility in highly dynamic environments. This paper is a two-page discussion introducing a more extensive paper, accepted for publication in the E4MAS 2006 postproceedings.

Authors

• Tom Holvoet
• Paul Valckenaers

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