A Case of Self-Organising Environment for MAS: the Collective Sort Problem

Environments of multiagent systems typically feature the application of techniques coming from the research context of complex systems: adaptivity and self-organisation are exploited in order to tackle recurrent issues in multiagent systems applications like openness, dynamism and unpredictability. By adopting the ?agents and artifacts? meta-model, we conceived the environment as populated by artifacts: as a specific case, we consider them as information repositories storing relevant facts about the external world and agent interaction/coordination. We focus on the coordination problem called col lective sort, where autonomous agents in charge of managing such artifacts have the goal of moving information across different artifacts according to local criteria, resulting in the emergence of the complete clustering property. Using a library we developed for the Maude term rewriting system, we simulate the behaviour of this system and evaluate a full solution to this problem.