The MACODO middleware for context-driven dynamic agent organizations

Abstract

One of the major challenges in engineering distributed multiagent systems is the coordination necessary to align the behavior of different agents. Decentralization of control implies a style of coordination in which the agents cooperate as peers with respect to each other and no agent has global control over the system, or global knowledge about the system. The dynamic interactions and collaborations among agents are usually structured and managed by means of roles and organizations. In existing approaches agents typically have a dual responsibility: on the one hand playing roles within the organization, on the other hand managing the life-cycle of the organization itself, for example, setting up the organization and managing organization dynamics. Engineering realistic multiagent systems in which agents encapsulate this dual responsibility is a complex task. In this article, we present a middleware for context-driven dynamic agent organizations. The middleware is part of an integrated approach, called MACODO: Middleware Architecture for COntext-driven Dynamic agent Organizations. The complementary part of the MACODO approach is an organization model that defines abstractions to support application developers in describing dynamic organizations, as described in Weyns et al. [2010]. The MACODO middleware offers the life-cycle management of dynamic organizations as a reusable service separated from the agents, which makes it easier to understand, design, and manage dynamic organizations in multiagent systems. We give a detailed description of the software architecture of the MADOCO middleware. The software architecture describes the essential building blocks of a distributed middleware platform that supports the MACODO organization model. We used the middleware architecture to develop a prototype middleware platform for a traffic monitoring application. We evaluate the MACODO middeware architecture by assessing the adaptability, scalability, and robustness of the prototype platform.

A Generic Holonic Control Architecture for Heterogeneous Multiscale and Multiobjective Smart Microgrids

“…We have borrowed the organisation concept from the multi-agent systems (MAS) domain, where it is widely employed to deal with system dynamism and openness [Weyns et al 2010] [Cabri et al 2004]. An organisation specifies abstract roles -in our case implemented by concrete controllers; and messages -exchanged among role players.…”

Traffic routing for evaluating self-adaptation

“…For example, the MACODO middleware for context-driven dynamic agent organizations has been used for routing traffic via traffic light agents [23]. The particular version of the routing traffic problem [23] has also been used elsewhere [22], [21], [24], [20].…”

“…Further, ADASIM allows the direct exploration of the effects of combining the approaches, perhaps learning that they complement or interfere with one another. Instead, today, researchers build their own custom simulators and define their problems independently, making comparison difficult [15], [23].…”

Challenges for adaptation in agent societies

“…MACODO (Middleware Architecture for COntext-driven Dynamic agent Organizations) (Weyns et al, 2010a) (Table 6) is a middleware that provides support for the management of organization adaptation. The organizational model used in this approach is composed by agents, capabilities, roles, and laws.…”

“…In (Weyns et al, 2010a), a traffic example is presented to show the behavior of the middleware. In this example, master controllers decide to merge organizations when a traffic jam has arisen in the streets that they observe.…”