Towards next generation coordination infrastructures

Abstract

Coordination infrastructures play a central role in the engineering of multiagent systems. Since the advent of agent technology, research on coordination infrastructures has produced a significant number of infrastructures with varying features. In this paper, we review the the state-of-the-art coordination infrastructures with the purpose of identifying open research challenges that next generation coordination infrastructures should address. Our analysis concludes that next generation coordination infrastructures must address a number of challenges: (i) to becomesocially aware, by facilitating human interaction within a MAS; (ii) to assist agents in their decision making by providingdecision supportthat helps them reduce the scope of reasoning and facilitates the achievement of their goals; and (iii) to increaseopennessto support on-line, fully decentralised design and execution. Furthermore, we identify some promising approaches in the literature, together with the research issues worth investigating, to cope with such challenges.

A Coupled Operational Semantics for Goals and Commitments

“…In this section we survey work pertaining commitment or goal semantics, and indicate the novelty of our contribution. Rodríguez-Aguilar, Sierra, Arcos, López-Sánchez, and Rodríguez (2015) provide a survey of agent coordination infrastructures, noting that "next generation coordination infrastructures must address a number of challenges", including "decision support" to help agents' reason about their goals-in which respect we argue for the saliency of agents' commitments.…”

A Conceptual Model for Situating Purposes in Artificial Institutions

“…In this way, the mentioned limitations can be overcome. Besides, Aguilar et al [28] corroborate this conclusion by stating that institutions have not yet considered how to help agents in decision-making, helping achieve their own goals. An open question of models of artificial institutions is the support to the agents' reasoning on goal achievement in institutional contexts.…”

“…Nonetheless, artificial institutions, as currently conceived, do not specify the purposes associated with status-functions. That is, they do not support to agents' reasoning [15]. Considering these issues, the main contribution of this paper is a conceptual model to express the purposes associated with the status-functions that composes the artificial institutions presents on the MAS.…”

“…Proposals of artificial institutions were studied on [12,6,5,13,14] considering the effective implementations of institutions in computational systems. Although the works on artificial institutions focus on supporting the regulation of the system, they can also help the agents reach their goals [15]. From those examples and explanations, we consider that the interpretation of a status-function is related to its purposes (i.e., the new state of the world that the agent executing that function will bring to).…”

Conceptual Framework for Ubiquitous Cyber-Physical Assembly Systems in Airframe Assembly

“…One catalyst for its adoption has been the Autonomic Computing vision of IBM (Kephart and Chess, 2003). Autonomous systems research is extremely cross-disciplinary embracing learning, robotics, collective intelligence (Bonabeau et al, 1999), complex adaptive and self-organisation systems (Hillston et al, 2015), pervasive computing (Zambonelli et al, 2015), modelling and verification (Fisher et al, 2013), rule-based or norm-governed systems (Boella et al, 2006), human-computer interaction (Klein et al, 2004), decision support (Rodríguez-Aguilar et al, 2015), and sensor networks (Akyildiz et al, 2002). Cognitive Computing (Hussain, 2009;Modha et al, 2011) is another emerging disruptive technology with potentially significant impact on developing systems' abilities to understand regulatory requirements and rules.…”