Coordination Artifacts: Environment-based Coordination for Intelligent Agents

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.

reference talk

 Coordination Artifacts: Environment-based Coordination for Intelligent Agents (AAMAS 2004, 21/07/2004) — Andrea Omicini (Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, Mirko Viroli, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Luca Tummolini)

origin event

 AAMAS 2004

funding project

 TRUST 03 — Trust and law in the Information Society. Fostering and protecting trust in the market, in the institutions and in the technological infrastructure (01/01/2003–31/12/2005)

reference publication for talk

 Coordination Artifacts: Environment-based Coordination for Intelligent Agents (AAMAS 2004, 21/07/2004) — Andrea Omicini (Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, Mirko Viroli, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Luca Tummolini)