Mirko Viroli, Danilo Pianini, Alessandro Ricci, Pietro Brunetti, Angelo Croatti

Recent works foster the idea of engineering distributed situated systems by taking an aggregate stance: design and development are better conducted by abstracting away from individuals' details, directly programming overall system behaviour instead. Concerns like interaction protocols, self-organisation, adaptation, and large-scaleness, are automatically hidden under the hood of the platform supporting aggregate programming. This paper aims at bridging the apparently significant gap between this idea and agent autonomy, paving the way towards an aggregate computing approach for multi-agent systems. Specifically, we introduce and analyse the idea of ``aggregate plan'': a collective plan to be played by a dynamic team of cooperating agents.

Keywords: Spatial Computing; Aggregate Programming; Computational Fields

PRIMA 2015: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9387, pages 49-64, 2015.
Qingliang Chen, Paolo Torroni, Serena Villata, Jane Hsu, Andrea Omicini (eds.), Springer International Publishing

@incollection{VPRBC-PRIMA2015,
year={2015},
isbn={978-3-319-25523-1},
booktitle={PRIMA 2015: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems},
volume={9387},
series={Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
editor={Chen, Qingliang and Torroni, Paolo and Villata, Serena and Hsu, Jane and Omicini, Andrea},
doi={10.1007/978-3-319-25524-8_4},
title={Multi-agent Systems Meet Aggregate Programming: Towards a Notion of Aggregate Plan},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25524-8_4},
publisher={Springer International Publishing},
author={Viroli, Mirko and Pianini, Danilo and Ricci, Alessandro and Brunetti, Pietro and Croatti, Angelo},
pages={49-64},
language={English}
}