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Coordination of Pervasive Systems

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Coordination of Complex Sociotechnical Systems

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Abstract

In this chapter a novel approach to coordination in situated Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is described, by presenting a meta-model for situated MAS engineering, an architecture for the design of tuplespace-based middleware for situated coordination, and a language dealing with situatedness-related issues. Accordingly, a review of meta-models and architectures from an historical perspective discusses their evolution, up to a reference meta-model and abstract architecture (Sect. 4.1); then, instantiation of the reference architecture on the TuCSoN middleware is described, focussing on the issue of environmental situatedness (Sect. 4.2); finally, spatial situatedness is analysed, by describing how the ReSpecT language deals with it (Sect. 4.3).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://jade.tilab.com/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.fipa.org/.

  3. 3.

    http://jason.sourceforge.net/.

  4. 4.

    http://cartago.apice.unibo.it.

  5. 5.

    See the TuCSoN official guide at http://www.slideshare.net/andreaomicini/the-tucson-coordination-model-technology-a-guide.

  6. 6.

    Primitive getEnv(temp, T) is an alias for env(temp, T), making explicit that the operation is meant to perceive something from the environment.

  7. 7.

    Primitive setEnv(temp, T) is an alias for env(temp, T), making explicit that the operation is meant to affect something in the environment.

  8. 8.

    Care should be taken not to overload the artefact while not being too coarse in time intervals.

  9. 9.

    A simple mechanism implemented on top of Java java.util.TimerTask does the job.

  10. 10.

    A Prolog-like notation is adopted for describing the modality of arguments: + is used for specifying input argument, - output argument, ? input/output argument, @ input argument which must be fully instantiated (ground).

  11. 11.

    Precision of the GPS service available applies.

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  1. Dipartimento di Informatica - Scienza e Ingegneria (DISI), Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Mariani

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Mariani, S. (2016). Coordination of Pervasive Systems. In: Coordination of Complex Sociotechnical Systems. Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Theory, and Algorithms. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47109-9_4

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