Socio-Intentional Architectures for Multi-Agent Systems: the Mobile Robot Control case

This paper proposes architectural styles for multi-agent systems (MAS) which adopt concepts from organization theory and strategic alliances. These styles are socio-intentional in the sense that they consist of actors who have goals to fulfil and social dependencies describing their obligations. They are represented in i*, a framework designed to model social and intentional primitives and formalized in terms of Formal Tropos. Each proposed style is evaluated with respect to a set of agent software qualities, such as predictability, adaptability and openness. The use of the styles is illustrated and contrasted with a software architecture for mobile robots reported in the literature.