System Integration through Agent Coordination

TL;DR: This paper articulates a precise conceptual model of coordination based on a representation of coordination knowledge as plans described in a special planning language enhanced with communicative actions that provides objects and control structures that substantiate its concepts and allow the construction of real multi-agent systems in industrial domains.

Abstract: Agents are software components that support the construction of distributed information systems as collections of autonomous entities that interact according to complex and dynamic patterns of behavior. A major problem of multi-agent structured information systems is the coordination of these interactions and behaviors to achieve the goals of the participants and coherence of the system as a whole. This paper articulates a precise conceptual model of coordination based on a representation of coordination knowledge as plans described in a special planning language enhanced with communicative actions. The execution of these plans by agents results in multiple structured ‘conversations’ taking place among agents. The model is extended to a complete language design that provides objects and control structures that substantiate its concepts and allow the construction of real multi-agent systems in industrial domains. To support incremental, in context acquisition and debugging of coordination knowledge we provide an extension of the basic representation and a visual tool allowing users to capture coordination knowledge as it dynamically emerges from the actual interactions. The plan-action organization exhibited by the coordination language departs in several ways from the standard object orientation of computational languages and is, we argue, more appropriate to modeling coordination. The language has been fully implemented and successfully used in several industrial applications, the most important being the integration of multi-agent supply chains for manufacturing enterprises. This application is used throughout the paper to illustrate the introduced concepts and language constructs.