Performance Evaluation of DPS Coordination Strategies Modeled in Pi-calculus

Distributed problem solving (DPS) is a subfield of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) concerned with using systems of agents to solve large-scale, distributed problems like data interpretation in sensor networks. Methods for producing effective coordination strategies for DPS systems, is an active area of research. Because there are not yet approaches that can automatically produce such strategies for most real-world DPS applications, some human engineering is often still necessary. As a result, there is a need for tools to support such human engineering. The type of tool we envision would allow a proposed strategy to be modeled at various levels of abstraction and be able to analyze various properties of the strategy, such as its time to solution and the possibility of deadlock. This paper reports on research to develop key elements needed for such a tool. In particular, we investigated the use of pi-calculus as a formal framework for defining multi-agent coordination strategies for DPS, as well as techniques for evaluating the time performance of such strategies.