Abstract
This paper is part of a long term research program on multi-agent systems (MASs), based on the proposition that the interactions among the members of a large and heterogeneous system of autonomous agents need to be governed by a global and strictly enforced law; and that such laws need to be local, so that they can be complied with at the locus of each agent—without having any direct information of the coincidental state of other members of the MAS. Such concept of law has been realized under our LGI coordination and control mechanism.
This paper shows how local laws over a MAS can be used to establish global and aggregate system properties in a scalable manner; where by “aggregate properties” we mean properties defined over the coincidental interactions among several, possibly many, members of a given multi-agent system.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Minsky, N.H.: The imposition of protocols over open distributed systems. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (February 1991)
Minsky, N.H., Ungureanu, V.: Law-governed interaction: a coordination and control mechanism for heterogeneous distributed systems. TOSEM, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 9(3), 273–305 (2000), available from, http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~minsky/pubs.html
Minsky, N.H., Leichter, J.: Law-governed Linda as a coordination model. In: Ciancarini, P., Nierstrasz, O., Yonezawa, A. (eds.) Object-Based Models and Languages for Concurrent Systems. LNCS, vol. 924, pp. 125–146. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)
Serban, C., Minsky, N.H.: The lgi web-site (includes the implementation of lgi, and its manual). Technical report, Rutgers University (June 2005), available at, http://www.moses.rutgers.edu
Weyns, D., Omicini, A., Odell, J.: Environment as a first class abstraction in multiagent systems. in Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 14(1) (January 2007)
Minsky, N.H.: Law Governed Interaction (LGI): A Distributed Coordination and Control Mechanism (An Introduction, and a Reference Manual) (June 2005), available at, http://www.moses.rutgers.edu/documentation/manual.pdf
Ao, X., Minsky, N.H.: Flexible regulation of distributed coalitions. In: Snekkenes, E., Gollmann, D. (eds.) ESORICS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2808, Springer, Heidelberg (2003), available from, http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~minsky/pubs.html
Shoham, Y., Tennenholz, M.: On the synthesis of useful social laws for artificial agents societies. In: Proceedings of AAAI-92 (1992)
Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N.R., Wooldridge, M.: Developing multiagent systems: the gaia methodology. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) (July 2003)
Esteva, M., de la Cruz, D., Sierra, C.: Islander: an electronic institutions editor. In: AAMAS 2002 (2002)
Gatti, A., Lucena, C., Brio, J.: On fault tolerance in law-governed multi-agent systems. In: Proc. of ISE’05, 4th Int. Workshop on Soft. Eng. for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems, July, ACM, New York (2006)
Artikis, A., Sergot, M., Pitt, J.: Specifying norm-governed computational societies. Technical report, Department of Computing, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, London (2006)
Mockapetris, P.: Domain names - concepts and facilities (Nov. 1987), available at, ftp://ftp.is.co.za/rfc/rfc1034.txt
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhang, W., Serban, C., Minsky, N. (2007). Establishing Global Properties of Multi-Agent Systems Via Local Laws. In: Weyns, D., Parunak, H.V.D., Michel, F. (eds) Environments for Multi-Agent Systems III. E4MAS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4389. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71103-2_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71103-2_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71102-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71103-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)