Coordination Strategies for Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

In this chapter, we elaborate on the coordination perspectives of the organizational framework, introduced in Section 2.2.1 (p.12). The operational perspective is concerned with modeling technical activities performed by Operators. The coordination perspective is concerned with modeling coordination over these technical activities. In order to assist Managers in reasoning about coordination, strategies are represented in the form of problem-solving methods. Agents that need coordination, can agree to commit to one or more coordination strategies. Underlying the problem-solving methods is a coordination ontology that models the concepts and relationships describing the coordination domain. The coordination strategies are based on existing strategies, which were introduced in Section 2.2.3 (p.16). We report on a small experiment in which three coordination strategies were implemented as problem-solving methods in a multi-agent system.

The outcome of the experiment gives us observations concerning the appropriate use of coordination strategies. These observations are based on efficiency (the costs of communication and process time) and comparison between the strategies.