CoCoMAS

Project code: CoCoMAS
Research group: Coordination Languages (SEN3)

Start: 2006-12-01
End: 2010-12-01

Coordinator of this project: Frank de Boer

Agent-oriented development methodology is a promising software engineering paradigm that aims at developing multi-agent systems for complex distributed applications. A typical example of such an application area is incident management. In incident management, different organizations are involved, such as police, fire, and ambulance departments, whose behaviors are coordinated by means of social/organizational structures. Each of these organizations can in turn consist in coordinating other organizations or individual agents. Each individual agent has to coordinate the different roles it can play.

The main problem addressed in this project is how to design and develop executable coordination models at various levels within multi-agent systems and how to integrate these models. We distinguish three main levels of coordination in multi-agent systems:

• intra-agent level: coordination of roles within agents
• inter-agent level: coordination of agents
• multi-agent level: coordination of multi-agent systems

The executable coordination models at these levels and their integration allow the development of compositional executable models for multi-agent systems. Our approach will be inspired by component-based software engineering, which advocates the principle of construction of software systems through composition of coordination of autonomous components. This general principle provides a promising perspective on the formal description of the organizational structures of multi-agent systems in terms of exogenous coordination models. Unlike endogenous coordination models, exogenous coordination models reside outside the entities that they coordinate. The most significant benefit of the development of such models is that these respect the general software engineering principle called separation of concerns. In our case, the separation of concern is between coordination and behavior, that is, between deliberation and roles within agents at the intra-agent level, between organizational structures and agents at the inter-agent level, and between organizational structures and multi-agent systems at the multi-agent level.

In this project we focus on the development and implementation of integrated programming languages for exogenous coordination of roles, individual agents, and multi-agent systems. The context of this project is given by an integration and implementation of extensions of the existing agent-oriented programming language 3APLand the exogenous coordination language REO. As a test case and metric for the validation of our ideas we plan to model the organizational structures in the incident management application and, using these models, to participate in the RoboCupRescue Simulation League competition. Such an implementation can be used for simulation and evaluation of incident management.

Members

Prof.dr. F. Arbab, Prof.dr. F.S. de Boer

Cooperation

Utrecht University (Mehdi Dastani and John-Jules Meyer)