An Agent Mediated Approach to Dynamic Change in Coordination Policies

Distributed information systems for decision-support, logistics, and e-commerce involve coordination of autonomous information resources and clients according to specific domain independent and domain dependent policies. A major challenge is handling dynamic changes in the priorities, preferences, and constraints of the clients and/or the resources. Addressing such a challenge requires solutions to two problems: a) Reasoning about the need for dynamic changes to coordination policies in response to changes in priorities, preferences, and constraints. b) Coordinating the run-time assembly of policy changes in a dependable manner. This paper introduces the NAVCo approach to address these problems. The approach involves exploiting negotiation-based coordination to address the first problem and model-based change coordination to address the second problem. These two key features of the approach are well suited for realization using an agent-based architecture. The paper describes the architecture with specific emphasis on the analysis and design of the agent specifications for negotiation and change coordination.