Capturing and modeling coordination knowledge for multi-agent systems

The agent view provides a level of abstraction at which we envisage computational systems carrying out cooperative work by interoperating globally across networks connecting people, organizations and machines. A major challenge in building such systems is coordinating the behavior of the individual agents to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants. As part of a larger project targeted at developing an Agent Building Shell for multiagent applications, we have designed and implemented a coordination language aimed at explicitly representing, applying and capturing coordination knowledge for multiagent systems. The language provides KQML-based communication, an agent definition and execution environment, support for modeling interactions as multiple structured conversations among agents, rule-based approaches to conversation selection and execution, as well as an interactive tool for in context acquisition and debugging of cooperation knowledge. The paper presents these components in detail and then shows how the coordination language is used in the Agent Building Shell to manage content-based information distribution scenarios among agents and the coordination aspects of conflict management processes that occur when agents encounter inconsistencies. The major application of the system is the construction and integration of multiagent supply chain systems for manufacturing enterprises. This application is used throughout the paper to illustrate the introduced concepts and language constructs.