Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, Mirko Viroli, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Luca Tummolini

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.

3rd international Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2004), pages 286-293, 19-23 July 2004.
Nicholas R. Jennings, Carles Sierra, Liz Sonenberg, Milind Tambe (eds.), ACM, New York, USA

@inproceedings{coord-aamas04,
	AcmId = {1018752},
	Address = {New York, USA},
	Author = {Omicini, Andrea and Ricci, Alessandro and Viroli, Mirko and Castelfranchi, Cristiano and Tummolini, Luca},
	Booktitle = {3rd international Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2004)},
	Doi = {10.1109/AAMAS.2004.10070},
	Editor = {Jennings, Nicholas R. and Sierra, Carles and Sonenberg, Liz and Tambe, Milind},
	Isbn = {1-58113-864-4},
	Month = {19--23~} # jul,
	Pages = {286--293},
	Publisher = {ACM},
	ScopusId = {2-s2.0-4544292991},
	Title = {Coordination Artifacts: Environment-based Coordination for Intelligent Agents},
	Url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1018752},
	Volume = 1,
	Year = 2004}