Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

The interest for multi-agent systems (MASs) has grown increasingly in the last years. These systems are beginning to be used in a great variety of applications such as air traffic control, process control, manufacturing, electronic commerce, patient monitoring, or games. This appeal is due to the fact that multi-agent systems present very attractive means of more naturally understanding, designing and implementing several classes of complex distributed and concurrent software. This growing attention to multi-agent technology has been even more accentuated with the increase of internet computing, which integrates an underlying infrastructure presenting a space organization in which autonomous agents roam and interact with one another.

Nevertheless, as a consequence of their popularity, the terms “autonomous agents” and “multi-agent systems” are often misused. It is indeed not rare to find software described in these terms, although it is not necessarily correlated with multi-agent technology. Therefore, we have to clarify what autonomous agents and multi-agent systems really are, how they can be modeled, designed and implemented.

This chapter is organized as follows. In sections 2.2 and 2.3, we present what are autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. On this basis, we discuss in section 2.4 MAS modeling by proposing an explicit integration of the interaction setup of a MAS and by sustaining a distinction between subjective and objective coordination. Then, section 2.5 exposes our target class of systems. Finally section 2.6 discusses how practical MASs can be built and concludes by maintaining the use of coordination models and languages for the design and the implementation of MASs.