Toward Systemic MAS Development: Enforcing Decentralized Self-organization by Composition and Refinement of Archetype Dynamics

The utilization of self-organizing processes promises scalability, robustness and adaptivity in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), solely based on decentralized coordination of individual actors. Bionic development approaches are being established, which reuse decentralized coordination mechanisms that are derived from natural self–organizing systems. In this paper, we address analysis activities in incremental MAS development, concerning with the derivation of system architectures that enable applications to meet system requirements. As the functional requirements to self–organizing MAS comprise recurring types of system wide dynamics, we propose a systemic approach to analysis and architectural design activities by the iterative refinement of macroscopic dynamics. Based on a catalog of dynamic models of currently applied environment–mediated design metaphors, we discuss how intended MAS dynamics can be modeled and refined to decentralized MAS designs. A systemic design procedure is proposed and exemplified in a case study that demands the combination of two established design metaphors to enable an projected level of MAS adaptivity.