Abstract

this paper we focus on the solutions we are providing for the outer layer of the architecture. They are embedded into a domain independent COOrdination Lan3 guage (COOL) that provides services for defining distributed agent configurations, managing communication, defining and managing structured interactions amongst agents, external software integration and in context acquisition and debugging of coordination knowledge. As these solutions impact on the way agents manage change by information distribution and conflict resolution, we also address these aspects showing how the coordination service supports these tasks. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2 we review the work in Distributed Artificial Intelligence from several perspectives and define our research goals. As the subsequent presentation of our tools is carried out in the context of our main application, the agent-based integration of the supply chain of manufacturing enterprises, we continue in section 3 with presenting this application domain. Section 4 deals with the main subject of the paper, the components of the coordination language. We illustrate the language throughout with examples from the supply chain. Section 5 then deals with the coordination knowledge acquisition service that allows users to extend and debug coordination knowledge on-line. To show how the coordination system is integrated with other reasoning tasks in the Agent Building Shell, in section 6 we review two other services of the architecture that make use of the coordination framework, cooperative information distribution and cooperative conflict management. In the end, we discuss some related approaches and provide concluding remarks.

Citations