Infrastructures for the Environment of Multiagent Systems

The notion of environment is receiving an increasing attention in the development of multiagent applications. This is witnessed by the emergence of a number of infrastructures providing agent designers with useful means to develop the agent environment, and thus to structure an effective multiagent application. In this paper we analyse the role and features of such infrastructures, and survey some relevant examples. We endorse a general viewpoint where the environment of a multiagent system is seen as a set of basic bricks we call environment abstractions, which (i) provide agents with services useful for achieving individual and social goals, and (ii) are supported by some underlying software infrastructure managing their creation and exploitation. Accordingly, we focus the survey on the opportunities that environment infrastructures provide to system designers when developing multiagent applications

Views: Customizable Abstractions for Context-Aware Applications in MANETs

Programming applications for highly dynamic environments such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is complex, since the working context of applications changes continuously. This paper presents "views" as abstractions for representing and maintaining context information, tailored to applications in MANETs. An application agent can define a view by declaratively describing the context information it is interested in. A supporting middleware platform, called ObjectPlaces, ensures that the information represented by a view continuously reflects the agent's context information, despite the dynamic situation in a MANET. We elaborate on the distributed protocol that ObjectPlaces uses to maintain the information of views, and give a thorough evaluation

A basic taxonomy for role composition

Roles are the basic building blocks for defining the behavior of agents in multi-agent systems. Agents typically perform several roles. In this paper, we describe analysis and design issues in defining agents as compositions of roles. In short, specifying the behavior of an agent entails in essence two issues: which roles are assigned to a particular agent, and how does an agent select a role in a particular situation. Both issues can be decided upon either by the designer (i.e. at design time) or by the agent (i.e. at run-time). This paper describes a basic taxonomy for role composition based on both issues, and illustrates the different composition approaches using a case study in the domain of manufacturing control. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.Book subtitle: RESEARCH ISSUES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATIONSstatus: publishe