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Coordination Infrastructures in the Engineering of Multiagent Systems

Andrea Omicini, Sascha Ossowski, Alessandro Ricci
On the theoretical side, coordination is a critical issue for MAS engineering, since it deals with modelling and managing the ever growing complexity of the agent interplay within a MAS. On the practical side, the availability of powerful and robust infrastructures is a key factor to enable and promote MAS as a mainstream software engineering technology. By adopting Activity Theory as a unifying framework for the many existing approaches to MAS coordination, we put forward the notion of artifact as a key concept for infrastructures, from which we derive some distinctive properties that a coordination infrastructure should feature. Finally, we discuss how a principled approach to MAS engineering based on coordination infrastructures could be built around such a notion.
Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems: The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Handbook, Ch. 14, Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations 11, pages 273-296, June 2004.
Federico Bergenti, Marie-Pierre Gleizes, Franco Zambonelli (eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers 
@incollection{coord-mseasbook,
	Author = {Omicini, Andrea and Ossowski, Sascha and Ricci, Alessandro},
	Booktitle = {Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems: The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Handbook},
	Chapter = 14,
	Doi = {10.1007/1-4020-8058-1_17},
	Editor = {Bergenti, Federico and Gleizes, Marie-Pierre and Zambonelli, Franco},
	Isbn = {978-1-4020-8057-9},
	Isbn-10 = {1-4020-8057-3},
	Isbn-Online = {978-1-4020-8058-6},
	Month = jun,
	Pages = {273--296},
	Part = {IV},
	Publisher = {Kluwer Academic Publishers},
	Series = {Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations},
	Title = {Coordination Infrastructures in the Engineering of Multiagent Systems},
	Url = {http://link.springer.com/10.1007/1-4020-8058-1_17},
	Volume = 11,
	Year = 2004}