Playing with Agent Coordination Patterns in MAGE

MAGE (Multi-Agent Game Environment) is a logic-based framework that uses games as a metaphor for representing complex agent activities within an artificial society. More specifically, MAGE seeks to (a) reuse existing computational techniques for norm-based interactions and (b) complement these techniques with a coordination component to support complex interactions. The reuse part of MAGE relates physical actions that happen in an agent environment to count as valid moves of a game representing the social environment of an application. The coordination part of MAGE supports the construction of composite games built from component sub-games and corresponds to coordination patterns that support complex activities built from sub-activities. To illustrate the MAGE approach, we discuss how to use the framework to specify the coordination patterns required to form a virtual organisation in the context of a service-oriented scenario.